I began beta testing Windows 3.0 about a year before its release. I wrote programs in Actor, which is very similar to Smalltalk in syntax, starting with Actor version 2.0 and continuing through version 3.0.

I beta tested object-oriented Turbo Pascal for Windows, from about a year before its release. I've written several complete apps in TPW, including a sub-class of the Windows 3.0 Clock that displays the date in the caption, and a number of programmer utilities. I've completed about 30 TPW classes including a dialog-based application class, a font list class, and file, directory and disk drive classes. These classes were described in my first book, Borland Pascal Insider, (Wiley and Sons).

I was asked by Microsoft to join the Windows 3.1 beta program August, 1991, although it was December before the product was stable enough to use for my everyday work. Still, I began at that time to incorporate hooks for the 3.1 features of drag-and-drop, DDEML (Dynamic Data Exchange Management Library) and OLE (Object Linking and Embedding). In December I also began beta testing Visual Basic (at that time code-named Thunder). As of the current version, some say Visual Basic is not truly object-oriented (because it does not support inheritance through any method other than aggregation), but all along it has contained a number of object-oriented features. My article, "Oops! Can You Avoid These 10 Visual Basic Gotchas?" appeared in the October, 1992 issue of PC Techniques.

For the months February through September, 1991, I used C++ and CommonView. I took over a project that had seen a previous year of development. After a year and a half of wrestling with CommonView, the company decided to drop it and code in plain C. Note that the problem was CommonView, not C++. In C++ I wrote a number of re-usable classes including a data encryption class and an icon-display custom listbox. My preferred C/C++ compiler is Turbo C++ for Windows. My second book, Borland C++ Insider, was also published by Wiley and Sons.

I've also written any number of custom controls for Visual Basic. The first of these were written in C, using the Control Development Kit that was included with Microsoft's Visual Basic Professional Toolkit. Now, of course, such controls are ActiveX components and are written using C++ and even Visual Basic, itself.

The controls I've written so far include a hierarchical Outliner, a network Workstation Info control, and a control that encapsulates access to .INI files. Many of these were featured in my third book, Windows Programming Power with Custom Controls, published by the Coriolis Group. The follow-up fourth book, Windows 95 Programming Power with Custom Controls, was the first to add OLE (now called ActiveX) controls to the repertoire.

As you may know, Microsoft's original attempt at compound documents, now called OLE 1, was not successful. Microsoft's follow-up, COM (Component Object Model) was the basis for OLE 2 and more. When the original "OLE Controls" were perceived by the developer public as "sluggish," Microsoft renamed them "ActiveX Controls," which sounds faster. For a while, then, the terms COM, OLE and ActiveX were synonymous. Now, COM refers to the blanket technology that underlies almost everything Microsoft sells; OLE is reserved for its original purpose (object linking and embedding), and ActiveX is used primarily to refer to insertable controls and Internet components.

I’ve been teaching Visual C++ and Visual Basic classes at a rate of about three times  a month for the past several years.

Sincerely,

Paul S. Cilwa