Hi Sanyaade,
You're most welcome, I'm glad these coursework are useful.
I hope they help your students to get a good grasp of what's written in the Tao, of the C programming language (which is by many criteria the most important programming language: all the most crucial code for performing fundamental tasks is written in C, almost all platforms have C compiler, and so many languages were influenced by C), of eC and object orientation (as we will dive into Module 2 on object orientation concepts very soon), and the Ecere library as we start writing fun GUI and graphics projects with Ecere, and of programming in general.
I'm also glad all students were able to compile today, that's great news!
Now I'm wondering what did you have in Project Settings / Linker ? Was ecere in there?
Was ecereCOM in there? By default, ecere should come up in the Linker tab automatically when creating a new project (whether Console or not). And the path to Ecere SDK/bin (typically C:\Program Files\Ecere SDK\bin) should be in both File / Global Settings / Libraries and File / Global Settings / Binaries.
On Windows, Libraries is for 'linking' and Binaries is so that when running it will find the ecere.dll at the proper place. So please let me know about that, because your student shouldn't need to do anything special to the projects after the Global Settings are properly configured. I want to make sure things are kept simple for them so they can focus on coding!
(And doing all these exercises I'm preparing for them, they must hate me by now
)
About ecere.dll vs ecereCOM.dll. ecereCOM is the core runtime that powers the core eC language functionality, such as its reflection ability, its runtime dynamic module loading, and a small set of core eC functions. All of the coursework so far except for bringing up a Form and dialog will work with ecereCOM without a need for the Ecere library.
The Ecere library adds things like the GUI toolkit, networking system, graphics capabilities, and a lot more.
To use ecereCOM instead of Ecere, you must NOT import "ecere" anywhere in your code.
Because the ecere.dll contains a copy of ecereCOM (so that applications can work with a single ecere.dll), applications using Ecere should link with "ecere" in the project settings.
Applications to be deployed with ecereCOM only should link with "ecereCOM" instead in the libraries (and not import "ecere"). They should then be packaged with the appropriate dll.
However linking with ecere, while not importing "ecere", will also work. The application will simply pick up the Ecere COM functionality from the ecere.dll. That is what the default projects will do, and that should be perfectly fine. More details about ecereCOM can be found in the Tao on the section of importing libraries (page 96), but the ecereCOM specifics is an advanced topic that you shouldn't need to bother with, unless you want to write eC code that does not make use of the Ecere library and package things as tightly as possible.
About ecereCOM cross-platform nature: well obviously the shared libraries will only run on the target platform for which they were built. However the Distributed COM system, which allows creating objects and invoking their methods remotely, will work across different systems. So yes, it was designed in the same spirit as CORBA. The ecereCOM library on Linux is libecereCOM.so .
Ecere COM is basically how eC modules are organized and cataloged, allowing the compiler, the application, the IDE, and tools like the Documentor to query the classes implemented in each module.
Looking forward to meet your students on the forums!
All the best.
Jerome
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