Choosing a development language as a file explorer / importer

Started by 3DzForMe, June 15, 2018, 09:11:06

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3DzForMe

In the past I've used various incarnations of Microsoft Visual Studio for choosing pathnames for importing data files from.

However, over the varying operating systems Microsoft has delivered, and the way in which 'My Docs' is resolved - it has caused me some headaches in trying to make XP and W7 compatible. Even different  versions of W7 (home to Ultimate) presented their challenges in navigating to My Docs.

The main issue is users generally don't have access to the Program Files directory to deposit their files in for imports.

So, I'm inclined to see what Microsoft are offering currently in the Visual Studio department these days, does anyone have any other suggestions as a front end which provides a path navigation element to it which can write a path a user chooses via a windows explorer element to set a config file?
BLitz3D, IDEal, AGK Studio, BMax, Java Code, Cerberus
Recent Hardware: Dell Laptop
Oldest Hardware: Commodore Amiga 1200 with 1084S Monitor & Blitz Basic 2.1

col

Hiya,

I'm not exactly sure what you're looking for but taking a guess that you're looking for information on the similarities of system folders between the XP and Win7 then here are a couple of links that may help.

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/6083.windows-xp-folders-and-locations-vs-windows-7-and-vista.aspx
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd378457(v=vs.85).aspx

I'm sure Brucey has a BlitzMax file system module that will resolve these for you, however I know that you're quite partial to using B3D :)
https://github.com/davecamp

"When you observe the world through social media, you lose your faith in it."

3DzForMe

Thanks for the feedback Col, I downloaded the community edition of Visual Studio (previously known as Visual studio express) and have managed to code a solution to my woes from way back in an evening. Happy days  ;D
BLitz3D, IDEal, AGK Studio, BMax, Java Code, Cerberus
Recent Hardware: Dell Laptop
Oldest Hardware: Commodore Amiga 1200 with 1084S Monitor & Blitz Basic 2.1

Qube

In Visual Studio I've always done :


myDocsPath = My.Computer.FileSystem.SpecialDirectories.MyDocuments


Not tested under XP as for the last few years no one has wanted support for below Windows 7.

Visual Studio is really nice and although .net can be super wordy it's pretty much the best choice if doing Windows / Microsoft native app stuff. Although a huge fan of Delphi I do find that when doing the more system orientated apps like interfacing with Outlook or old GDI stuff ( don't ask ) then I prefer Visual Studio.
Mac Studio M1 Max ( 10 core CPU - 24 core GPU ), 32GB LPDDR5, 512GB SSD,
Beelink SER7 Mini Gaming PC, Ryzen 7 7840HS 8-Core 16-Thread 5.1GHz Processor, 32G DDR5 RAM 1T PCIe 4.0 SSD
MSI MEG 342C 34" QD-OLED Monitor

Until the next time.

Kryzon

Qt has a standards path class:
http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qstandardpaths.html#StandardLocation-enum

It's got Visual Studio integration too, but know that it's kind of an all-in-one framework (you just import it and you're done, you don't need to use other native libraries with it, it wraps most of it AFAIK).

At the very least you could look at the platform-specific source code:
https://github.com/qt/qtbase/blob/5.11/src/corelib/io/qstandardpaths_win.cpp#L104-L151