About code. Mostly on C++
You probably noticed that IE7 or Windows Media Player 11 don’t have the menu shown by default; it only shows up when you press the ALT key. This is one particularity of the look and feel of Windows Vista Aero. You can find guidelines about designing menus here: menu guidelines menu design concepts As revealed by … Read more
Windows Vista redesigned the way the file dialogs look. MFC 9.0 (that will ship with Visual Studio 2008) was updated to support the new look and feel. If you compile your MFC application with VS 2008 you get the new file dialogs with no additional change. On the other hand if you run the application … Read more
Visual Studio 2008 (formely code-named ‘Orcas’) has several important updates for VC++ and MFC. Among them the possibility to create syslink controls, command or split buttons and network address controls. In this post I will show how you can work with the syslink control. The control provides a way to embed hypertext links in a window. … Read more
Recently I’ve been asked how you can make method find of std::string case insensitive. An obvious solution is to transform the strings to lower case, for instance, and perform the search in lower case. The solution has some inconvenients and a clean and nice solution is defining custom traits that ignore the case. The solution I’m … Read more
If you want to find an item in a tree control (CTreeCtrl from MFC) by its name you need a recursive function. Below is a function that does that. How does it work: you pass the text of the item to search, the tree reference and an item in the tree. The function will search … Read more
The Oxford meeting of the ISO C++ standards committee between 15-20 April resulted in new features beeing into the draft paper of the C++0x standard. One of the features refer to Unicode support: a new header, called <cuchar>, was introduced. This header makes available new built-in types char16_t and char32_t, as well as new prefixes … Read more
I have decided to make a comparison for file IO operations on Win32, CRT, STL and MFC. For all four libraries/APIs I have done the profiling in the following way: open the file allocate the buffer used for reading start the timer read/write from/to the file stop the timer close the file release the memory … Read more
Working correctly with the Windows Registry might prove a little difficult, especially for beginners. One thing one should care about for example is using the correct access rights (not just the default ones) when creating a registry key. To ease the burden of directly using the Win32 registry API, I decided to wrap them inside … Read more
Suppose you have the following code: void foo() { throw std::runtime_error(“a foo exception!”); } int main() { foo(); } When running the program, the following window is popped up: When running it in the debugger, a different window is popped up: and the debugger takes you to the line of code that threw the exception. … Read more
In a previous post I explained than when you create a MFC application with the March CTP of ‘Orcas’ and add a command or split button to a dialog, the .rc file is not compiled, because styles such as BS_COMMANDLINK are not found. My workaround for the moment was to redeclare them in the resource.h … Read more