I used to have several open-source projects available on CodePlex. At the end of 2017, the site was put in read-only mode and it will probably be closed at some point. Therefore, I have decided to move the projects that could still be useful to GitHub.
Category: Windows Programming
How to determine what CLR versions are installed using C++
You may have multiple versions of the .NET framework installed and used on your machine. The framework has two components: the set of assemblies that provide functionalities for your application, and the common language runtime (CLR) that handles the execution of the application. These two components are versioned separately. If you what to see what…
What’s New in Visual Studio 2017 for C++ Development
Visual Studio 2017 has been officially launched today. The release notes contain a summary of all the changes available in the new version. This post is focused on the changes for C++ development. The Visual C++ team has released a series of blog posts to document some of the new features. Here is a list…
Changing Windows password complexity requirements
I recently encountered a problem creating new logins with SQL Server. Something that has worked for years suddenly stopped with the following error: Password validation failed. The password does not meet Windows policy requirements because it is too short. Since SQL Server was using Windows local security policy I went and checked that at Security…
CRT Refactored in Visual Studio “14”
Visual Studio “14” CTP ships with a refactored C Runtime. The first thing you’ll notice is that msvcrXX.dll has been replaced by three new DLLs: appcrtXX.dll, desktopcrtXX.dll and vcruntimeXX.ddl (where XX stands for the version number so in this version it’s appcrt140.dll, desktopcrt140.dll and vcruntime140.dll). You can see in this image that both desktopcrt140.dll and…
You Chemical Name – My First Windows Store App
My first Windows Store app (for Window 8.1) is now available in Windows Store. It’s called Your Chemical Name and shows names (and text) using chemical elements symbols in the Breaking Bad style. The application allows to: customize the appearance of text, colors, background customize the position of the text on the background save image…
Working with the Settings Charm for Windows 8.1 Store Applications
Windows 8 features a Settings charm to display both application (the top part) and system (the bottom part) settings (you get it from swiping from the side of the screen). The system provides two entry points, Permissions and Rate and Review, the later only for applications installed through the store. You can customize the settings…
Render the screen of a Windows Store App to a bitmap in Windows 8.1
In WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone it is possible to render a visual object into a bitmap using the RenderTargetBitmap. This functionality, that I find pretty basic, was not available for Windows Store applications. Fortunately, Windows 8.1 provides that functionality for Windows Store applications too, through the same RenderTargetBitmap class. There are some limitations though:…
cppconlib: A C++ library for working with the Windows console
This project has been moved to GitHub. New location: https://github.com/mariusbancila/cppconlib Many years ago I published on my blog a helper class for working with the Windows console that was wrapping the Windows console API. Looking back at it I realized it was a pretty naive implementation. So I decided to start a new and make…
Bindings for DataGridView hosted in an MFC application
A WinForms DataGridView control has the ability to automatically generate its columns and populate from a specified data source (which can be a DataSet, a simple list or something else). All you have to do is something like this: var list = new List<Record>() {new Record() {Id = 1, Name = “item 1”, Date =…