Category: Windows Programming

Unwrapping WinUI3 for C++

Posted on by Marius Bancila

The Windows UI Library 3, known shortly as WinUI 3, is a native UI framework that ships with the Windows App SDK. This is an SDK complementary to the Windows SDK, WPF, WinForms, and Win32. It provides a new unified set of APIs and tools that can be used to develop desktop apps on Windows 11 (as well as downwards to Windows 10, version 1809). I decided to have a look at what this framework provides and this post is written as I am trying it. To evaluate it, I’ll try to build a small application that does conversion between Celsius and Fahrenheit degrees as you type in a field.

How to build high DPI aware native Windows desktop applications

Posted on by Marius Bancila

If you’re developing native applications for Windows using Win32 or MFC and you want to support high DPIs so that the application looks crisp on any display, you have to do a lot of things by hand. That is because the technologies for building native UIs, that is MFC, GDI, GDI+, do not provide DPI scaling support. In this article, I will walk through some of the problems of supporting DPI scaling and the solutions for them.

Using Microsoft Edge in a native Windows desktop app – part 4

Posted on by Marius Bancila

In the previous articles, we learned how to perform navigation in a Windows desktop application and how navigation events work. However, until recently, it was not possible to perform POST or GET request using custom headers or content. This feature was added in version 705.50. In this fourth article of the series, we will look in detail at how to perform POST requests with custom headers and content.

Unit testing non-public types and members for .NET projects

Posted on by Marius Bancila

Unit testing is usually used for testing public types and members. However, there are cases when you might need to test types or members that are not public. These could be internal classes or private helper methods, for instance. Whether that is proper unit testing or beyond its scope is not a discussion that I want to get into here. However, in this post, I will show how you can unit test non-public types and members from .NET assemblies.

When faced with the need for testing non-public types and members you can use several approaches:

  • change the accessibility to public; you can do that perhaps only for debug builds and keep the intended accessibility in release builds by using conditional compilation.
  • provide public members of a class that invoke private ones;
  • use reflection.

The first solutions involve changing the API only for the sake of the testing. The last solution avoids that but requires more work. To help with that, the Visual Studio unit testing framework provides some helper types that enable you to focus on the actual testing and be less concerned about the reflection details.

Troubles with Windows SDK

Posted on by Marius Bancila

I recently installed a fresh copy of Visual Studio 2017 on a new machine and went on to build several projects some of them being VC++. The trouble was that I immediately run into a problem (actually the first problem was that MFC & ATL were missing because I forgot to check that in the list of Individual components so I had to install them separately). The problem was an error with a missing new.h header:

1>c:\program files (x86)\microsoft visual studio\2017\enterprise\vc\tools\msvc\14.15.26726\atlmfc\include\afx.h(62): fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'new.h': No such file or directory

May good reads

Posted on by Marius Bancila

Here is my list of good reads from May: Non-Ownership and Generic Programming and Regular types, oh my! Using C++17 std::optional Error Handling and std::optional std::accumulate vs. std::reduce How to Make SFINAE Pretty – Part 1: What SFINAE Brings to Code How to Make SFINAE Pretty – Part 2: the Hidden Beauty of SFINAE How…

Using the curl library from C++ on Windows

Posted on by Marius Bancila

curl is a project containing a command line tool and a library that can be used to transfer data using a variety of protocols, including, of course, HTTP and HTTPS. The library API is written in C, but there are various C++ wrappers on top of it. One of those is curlcpp. In this article, I will show how to build these libraries for Windows with Visual Studio.