When I started to look at JBA's Guidelines 2.1A I thought it was a fantastic GUI development tool for OS/2. The only problem was that in addition to being a relatively unskilled 'C++' programmer I had no skills whatsoever in the JOT language used by Guidelines. I did notice however that there seemed to be a similarity between Visual Basic and JOT so started to develop Guideline examples based on the examples in the SAMS book 'Teach Yourself Visual Basic in 21 Days' by Gurewich and Gurewich.
I intend to work through all those examples and then put them out for the use of others interested in Guidelines who would like to start off at a relatively low level and work up. If you have a copy of the VB book it will make the examples more understandable. Perhaps I will even write enough to include a book with these examples at some point.
Chapter 1 Hello.gui
Chapter 2 Speed.gui.
This example is not quite complete as although Guidelines provides a track function for sliders the .Pos property does not update until a mouse click. Thus you cannot see the figures changing as you move the slider. JBA is aware of the problem and presumably is addressing it. I did not take the time to try to find a work around at this point hoping that a release with bug fixes would be the solution. (3.1?)
Option.gui
Chapter 3 Multiply.gui
Sum.gui
Timer.gui
This program is somewhat more involved as the Base code of Guidelines (that provided on the Internet as shareware) does not have a timer function built in. My understanding is that the Professional Developers Kit (PDK) does but I am not ready to move to that just yet so found a work around using a thread. The result is that for a relatively simple procedure I now have an example of using both 'Threads' and using 'C++' in JOT.
Chapter 4 Move.gui
Draw.gui
VB has a built in control to allow resizing of a window drawing on it but Guidelines does not, so I had to find a work around for it also.
Howoften.gui
Button.gui
Button2.gui
Drag.gui - use mouse button 2 to drag and drop.
Drop.gui - included as part of Drag
Chapter 5 Colors.gui
Grow.gui - postponed until the release of 3.1 which will have an command called softmenu which should allow menus to be added to dynamically.
Chapter 6 message.gui
dialogs.gui - no date function in GL's and did not want to create one now so skipped the date entry field.
Common.gui - no attempt made to duplicate the VB cmdialog.vbx
Chapter 7
line.gui
shape.gui - no line thickness change available
moveeye.gui - icon included
moon.gui - icons included
Thanks to Andrew Lamb at JBA support for his help on some questions. Hopefully the use of this by others will cut down on the number of questions he will have to respond to in the future.
Please let me have your comments and input. Perhaps you know of ways to do some of the things I have left out or perhaps there are better ways to do some of the things that I have done.
