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Developing a Portable App.

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gandalf97
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Developing a Portable App.

I am thinking about developing a new PortableApp but I come from a .NET/Visual Studio background. I looked at the guide but what I am really interested in is what tools and language people find best. If I need to learn new tools and a new language, I want to make the best choice I can. Thanks!

Ken Herbert
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Just to clarify

Are you talking about making an existing app portable, or programming your own app from scratch?

If the former, all the tools are here: the PortableApps Launcher, PortableApps Installer, and NSIS Portable (you will need the Unicode version). You will also need the documentation about the PortableApps Format spec and the Launcher manual available in the Development section.

If you are talking about programming your own portable app, then there are quite a few languages that you could consider.

Just to list a couple, C++ (with or without a library like wxWidgets or Qt), Python and Java are commonly used in the making of portable applications. As with any programming languages, they all have their positives and negatives so the final choice would have to be yours.

Gord Caswell
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RE: .Net

As a side note: We currently are not officially releasing any .Net apps. That will change at some point in the future, but we're not there yet.

gandalf97
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Developing Portable Apps

Thanks Gord for the response.

I was talking about developing from scratch. Making an existing app portable is pretty well covered. And I realize that .NET is not an option.

When I started thinking about it, I realized that the last time I did any developing outside of Visual Studio was a very long time ago. I don't have much idea where to start looking at how do do Windows programming without using MS type tools. Database access is also something I would need. I am experienced with SQL-Server so I could probably use something like MySQL without too much trouble.

Does anyone have any pointers? Good programs to look at as examples?

Thanks in advance!

Eric

Ken Herbert
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While you will have to get

While you will have to get into a new language, at least you don't necessarily have to leave your familiar environment.

Visual Studio can do C++ (and I believe it can also be set up to use wxWidgets as well, unsure about Qt).

The resulting executable may need to have the MSVC++ runtimes bundled with it to be truly portable, but that isn't a big issue, we do the same with a number of apps here.

Database access is probably the least of your worries, there are SQL and/or MySQL drivers for most languages these days. If you are after a purely local database though (not a shared db on a server), for portable programming I would recommend SQLite.

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