[Dev-C++] Opinion about IDE Develpment Tools for EE

Dear Users,

   The EE(Electrical Engineering) course where I
work has, between other disciplines, four 1-year
Computer Program disciplines.
   The "most close" disciplines to a computer are:
Microprocessors, and Digital Electronics, and
Reconfigurable Computing.
   The main goal of the 4-disciplines is to able
the student to develop applications in the computer
to manage external systems through USB, serial and
parallel ports. Being capable of do this, apps like
robot arms, wire & wireless communications, etc are
implemented (the other disciplines take care of the
remaining topics).
   In this context the present-day situation is:
   1st year: algorithms and basic programming with
             Dos/Console;
   2nd year: intermidiate programming with Dos/Console;
   3rd year: Basic & Intermediate Windows Apps, basics
             of computer architecture, programming through
             paralell & serial port;
   4th year: Full systems with Windows Apps and programming
             through USB port.
   To provide a compatible learning, we decided to teach
ANSI-C programming because this same type of code can be
used in some microcontrollers (Microprocessors discipline)
and the C2H (C To Hardware) tool in Reconfigurable
Computing.
   We thought in the following way: there aren´t other
disciplines like Software Engineering (to teach UML), Data
Structures (... no comments!) and Systems Project & Analysis.
Because of this, it was decided only to provide a basic
learning of how to create a class, how to instanciate it and
how to re-utilize it.
   Because of this scenario I consider very difficult to work
with the students with Visual C++ (MFC... etc).

                   ------xxx------

   I present to you this scenario because of the following:
In the early 80´s, the old 2-diskettes Turbo C was used in
EE to develop a lot of systems. BCC (Borland C++) v5&6 provides
a way to the EE student to develop systems without the formal
need to work in OO. I think most of this is devoted to the
Component Based Programming style. Inside each one of the functions
the ANSI-C is used. Minimal VCL (Virtual Component Library) is
used (example: fscanf vs LoadFromFile). Not only in this EE course
but in a lot of others, I found this technical behavior (to
prefer the BCC tool). But BCC is stopped and it is necessary to
migrate to another IDE and, perhaps another way of discipline
structuring.

                   ------xxx------

   I know you guys like to talk a lot more than Dev-Cpp here
and, if you are interested to talk about this, here are my
questions:
   a) In the showed scenario how would you struct the
      4-year disciplines?
   b) With your changed (a) scenario, what IDE do you
      recommend?
   c) Without changing the showed scenario, do you
      know any other tool that does the same work of BCC?
   d) Am I wrong about MSVC? Can I do the same Component Based
      Programming using ANSI-C in the most parts of the code?

Thank you, people!

Regards
Andre



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