Why you should be proficient in PASCAL....

Generally I'm a big supporter of MS's Visual Studio. It took me a year to start feeling comfortable using it after learning C/C++ with Borland's Turbo C++ IDE. But for whatever reason VS is really *@%&#$% me off today. The main thing is that when I hit F1 (which is a highly used key for me these days), the "context sensitive" help is STUPID! It always comes up with the MFC or .NET help....like I've EVER used either of those on this PC. Every program is a Win32 C++....even if I set it to Visual C++ or Platform SDK, it still wants to come up with MFC help....gee thanks but your documentation is WRONG!!!! grrr......

The other thing is child control sub classing. What a pain in the @#%! Its darn near impossible to trap what should be considered common window messages from child controls without running seventeen stupid hoops. I mean come on, wouldn't it seem pretty useful to be able to catch WM_CHAR or WM_KEYUP messages for a freakin edit control! Instead you have to provide a callback function....which is great except when you might want to have a C++ class....callback's have to be static...which means EVERY instance of you class will use the same freakin method AND all data in that method must be static as well! There's a few ways around it, but it just seems like a stupid idea to have to perform nuclear fission on the code just to catch when the focus is on a text box and the user hits tab.

Of course, it's probably much easier to play with tab in MFC or C#, but even those have their drawbacks that piss me off. Like easy access to the message pump. Control over the parameters for CreateWindow() and a few others. Viva the PASCAL revolution....