Visual Windows Applications

by Ed Sawicki - President
Accelerated Learning Center
Tailored Computers

Visual development tools such as Microsoft's Visual Basic and Borland's (now Inprise) Delphi are a great way to develop custom Windows applications for your in-house needs when canned software just won't do. They allow people to rapidly (after the learning curve) develop applications that are suitable for in-house use. These people do not have to be professional programmers. I'll refer to these people as "visual programmers" for lack of a more precise term.

Some professional programmers use these tools as a prototyping tool. They can, for example, quickly build a program that implements the user interface for an application that is specified (sometimes in vague terms) by a client. The client can see how the program will look and behave and ask for changes before the programmer spends the time to develop the final version of the application - often using other languages and tools such as C, C++, Java, etc.

Hiding the details

Visual programmers don't need to understand the details of such things as operating systems and machine resource consumption. This is one of the main benefits of using these tools. The downside is that their applications are usually not of the same quality as programs built by professional programmers who know these details and know which tools to use to achieve high quality results. A good example of this difference is illustrated on the Radsoft web site.

This absence of knowledge of the details is one of the reasons why today's Windows programs are multi-megabyte beasts. These applications often contain vast amounts of code and data that is never used by the application when it is running. Why? Because the visual programmer doesn't know it's there. He or she doesn't know how to check for unused data and how to remove it. A development environment that hides the low level details from you can potentially hide quite a bit. A professional programmer using the right tools can easily create an equivalent program that is a small fraction of the size.

Visual programmers sometimes implement things solely because they just learned how to do it and think it's cool. Many visual programs, for example, install large amounts of data into the Windows Registry when most or all of it is not needed. In short, these programs are not only a burden on the computers they run on affecting performance, they may also cause instability.

It's one thing to use these visual development environments for building custom applications that would be too expensive to build in other ways. It's quite another for inexperienced visual programmers to build applications they sell to others. Unfortunately, the world is full of Windows applications that are built this way.

How can you avoid purchasing such a product? If an evaluation version of the product can be downloaded from the Internet, your first clue may be the size of the download file. If a program that promises to let you look up DNS names, ping IP hosts and do a traceroute weighs in at a few megabytes, you know this is a hog you need to avoid. There are programs that do the same thing and their download files are between 50 and 200 kilobytes (that's .05 to .2 megabytes) and they place very little or nothing in the Registry.

Where's the beef?

You certainly can't go to an Internet download site, such as tucows.com and choose the most efficient program based on their "cow" rating system. I've seen simple traceroute programs that weigh in at 5 MB that have a four cow rating. I thinks it's actually the cows that determine the ratings - maybe measuring the duration of a moo with a stopwatch.

Generally speaking, you have to ask yourself why you should purchase a program written with tools such as Visual Basic when most professional programmers, writing programs for sale, would choose other tools.