"Recommend a Programming Platform" Topic
7 Posts
All members in good standing are free to post here. Opinions expressed here are solely those of the posters, and have not been cleared with nor are they endorsed by The Miniatures Page.
Remember that you can Stifle members so that you don't have to read their posts.
For more information, see the TMP FAQ.
Back to the Computer Stuff Plus Board
Areas of InterestGeneral
Featured Hobby News Article
Featured Link
Featured Showcase Article How does coverbinding work?
Featured Workbench Article A guide to how Stronty Girl  paints piebald and skewbald horses.
Current Poll
|
| Ditto Tango 2 1 | 13 Jun 2009 9:51 a.m. PST |
A number of years ago, I spent a lot of time developing a generic computerized campaign manager which I never finished. Being a database person, I used MS Access as my development engine (don't laugh, please, I'll start to cry  ) but there were a lot of limitations in number of objects on a form, for example. After 4 years into it, I never finished the project. I'm interested in starting again. This is just a personal project, for my friends, I'm not out to compete with, say, Racing Spider's Campaigner software which I'd recommend to anyone looking for a computerized campaign moderating program. My background is SQL (Oracle) and I almost always use MS Access as a front end, so I'm very, very good with VBA. Can someone recommend a development tool? Prferably not too expensive… Thanks very much in advance for any suggestions.
--
Tim |
| alien BLOODY HELL surfer | 13 Jun 2009 3:05 p.m. PST |
Can only think of vivual basic as mentioned, C++ is a  (but the last time I looked at C in any form was about 18-19 years ago!). Not sure what the main languages are now – we run courses in VB and SQL/PHP get used in the web courses,internally I think as most of our dev stuff is for web/intranet use they use ASP.net a lot. |
| Nick Bowler | 13 Jun 2009 3:10 p.m. PST |
If you are good with VBA then the obvious suggestion is to use Visual Studio Express microsoft.com/Express . Its free, and has Visual Basic and SQL server Express (a cut down SQL server). It includes a full IDE. And although there are other languages out there that you can get for free and use with eclipse (a free IDE), I found it incredibly finnicky to get the right version of some languages that works with the right version of eclipse (PHP -- I'm looking at you!). Visual Studio Express just works. |
| hurcheon | 13 Jun 2009 3:57 p.m. PST |
Depends how you want to deploy it. If a Web hosted idea suits you then PHP might be worth looking at, or given your VBA experience ASP.NET. MysSQL, postGresSQL or SQL Light cab be used for the database, but that depends on your hosting |
| Lentulus | 15 Jun 2009 4:43 a.m. PST |
While I am not a Microsoft fan, I agree with Nick on this one, provided you want to stay in your comfort zone. If you want to move on, you should ask yourself if you want to release to a large audience, if you want to move to a web platform, or if you want to go open-source and get more people working on it. This might lead to different answers. But I have played with the VS express products, and they do work well. |
| 45thdiv | 15 Jun 2009 6:00 a.m. PST |
Hi Tim, I like and still use MS Access as a front end editor. It's a lot easier and faster to write complex queries. I like Nick's idea as well. It really does depend on what you want to do with the end product. |
| Minondas | 15 Jun 2009 10:49 a.m. PST |
As long as we are talking about Windows platform, then anything in .NET would work just fine for you – either VB or C#. You may also like to take a look at XNA, a derivative of C# tweaked for game programming. All of those are available for free in their Express editions. Throw in SQL Server Express (either 2005 or 2008) and you have simple, but complete developer enviroment and huge online support community. |
|
