About code. Mostly on C++
I read a very interesting article written in 2004 by Joel Spolsky, called How Microsoft Lost the API War. It shares my view that latelly, Microsoft has released simply too many programs and technologies and we can no longer cope with them. They have to take a break (and fix problems in the current releases) … Read more
Beta 2 for VS 2008 was made available at the end of the last week. It inclues beta releases for standard, professional, team system editions and the MSDN library. It also includes the beta 2Â for the .NET Framework 3.5 and a CTP for the Silverlight add-in for VS 2008 that allows you working with Silverlight … Read more
A collegue of mine pointed me today to this web site, http://www.ivosoftware.com/, that offers a very interesting speech synthesizer, called IVONA. Without trying to advertise for it, I just want to say that I was surprized that one of the three languages that is supports is Romanian, and the it sounds quite good. You can … Read more
Microsoft has announced yesterday that Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft SQL server 2008 will all be released on 27 February 2008 at an event in Los Angeles. In anticipation for the most significant Microsoft enterprise event in the next year, Turner announced that Windows Server® 2008, Visual Studio® 2008 and Microsoft SQL … Read more
Recently I have updated my article published on CodeGuru about determining Windows version and edition. The update offers support for determining the Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 edition installed on a machine. Since both these new operating systems have the same major and minor version returned by GetVersionEx, i.e. 6 for major and 0 … Read more
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