The painful bit is C++. I did a fair bit of that going back to MFC. Knocking stuff out in C# with WPF and WinForms was quite nice in comparison. I haven’t found anything nicer.
C# with WPF or WinForms only seems nice in comparison to other relatively painful tools IMO.
The old RAD graphical tools and newer ones like Rebol (that are now dated) show just what is possible. Mathematica is also pretty powerful and doesn't require a ton of code.
I think there is a thing called Microsoft Office development kit or some other name that allows C# and other .Net programs to manipulate Office apps. Not sure if it's what the author meant, though.
Oh, I have used OLE (or some iteration thereof) to drive Excel from Python. That was a long time ago, but it sounds similar. I wasn't really doing GUI, though - I was using code to build spreadsheets from data files.
I had something I wrote in the 90s I wasn't proud of that was a word macro that read Excel sheets for a list of instructions and used those to compose documents and print them. I feel sick thinking about it.
> The painful bit is C++. I did a fair bit of that going back to MFC.
I'm sorry but referring to MFC while referring C++ is a telltale sign you don't really have any meaningful experience in the field. Developing GUI apps for Windows is a breeze with frameworks like Qt. You only suffer if you're a masochist, but the rest of us prefer to pick things that make sense.
I have a lot of experience, in the real world, which is somewhat less ideal than "just use Qt - it's a breeze".
How do you manage a 15 million LOC desktop app originating from the late 90s which contains chunks of win32 native, ATL, MFC, custom GDI+ wrappers all sorts?
Aye you fuck off and work somewhere else that's what you do. Which is why it's still written in win32 native, ATL, MFC, custom GDI+ wrappers.
They paid two companies to come in and rewrite it, first in Qt which was a complete failure. Then in Electron etc, which was also a failure.
> How do you manage a 15 million LOC desktop app originating from the late 90s which contains chunks of win32 native, ATL, MFC, custom GDI+ wrappers all sorts?
You're complaining about your personal legacy "chunks of win32 native, ATL, MFC, custom GDI+ wrappers".
Not C++. Just your personal legacy projects you didn't managed to maintain or update.
C++ doesn't magically rewrite your technical debt. You need to do your work.
The old RAD graphical tools and newer ones like Rebol (that are now dated) show just what is possible. Mathematica is also pretty powerful and doesn't require a ton of code.