What was MS solution to Borland Turbo Vision?

[Shintaro1969]

Hi,
I was wondering if anyone knew what Microsoft did to combat Borland Turbo Vision (1990)?
Borland created OWL (Object Window Library), 1991, and in return Microsoft created MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes), 1992, on the Windows side.
Surely they must have had something, Code View, I would think, would have had some libraries.
I know MS created Visual Basic for DOS, 1991. But I don't know if there were such libraries for C or Assembly.

EDIT: So I found cwindow.h in the DOS source. Was there a public version available?
I have looked in MS C 6.0, 7.0 & MSVC 1.52.


Regards,
Craig

[DOS]

I was wondering if anyone knew what Microsoft did to combat Borland Turbo Vision (1990)?

Perhaps they felt that Windows was going to be a lot more popular than DOS TUIs and it wasn't worth doing anything to combat it?

From what I've seen (admittedly I might not have paid enough attention) it seems like Microsoft's compilers in that era generally came with a lot less included than say the Borland, Watcom and Symantec ones. Instead you'd get a brochure with various third party tools and libraries you could buy. Alternatively I imagine there were plenty of shareware TUI libraries available for C/C++.

[happycube]

Internally, Microsoft had a Character Windows library (I think Code Complete and/or Writing Solid Code referred to it) that was used for Word 5.5/6 for DOS etc, but was never put in MS C/C++.

[Battler]

Wouldn't Visual Basic for DOS have competed with this?

[MrKnowItAll]

Wouldn't Visual Basic for DOS have competed with this?

Correct! Codename THUNDER (or something like that?)

[rkurbatov]

Wouldn't Visual Basic for DOS have competed with this?

Visual Basic is closer to Delphi than to Turbo Vision as to me.

TV is somewhat niche product neither low-level API for advanced developers, nor high-level visual event-based RAD tool as Basic/Delphi. It simplifies life of the developer but requires quite good understanding of OOP concepts, especially C++ version. Seems like Microsoft, that lost competition to Borland in DOS development, concentrated on GUI and was not interested in TUI anymore.