About code. Mostly on C++
Problem I have recently migrated a C# 2.0 project registered for COM interop to .NET 4.5 and when I imported the type library in a C++ project with no_registry, suddenly I got some errors because the type library could not be imported. Here are the steps to reproduce: create a .NET Class Library project and … Read more
It is possible to host WPF controls in a Win32 application, and the other way around, but because of the differences betweeb these technologies there are various issues that can appear. One of these is handling of keyboard input. Without diving too much into differences between WPF and Win32, I will show how to provide … Read more
I recently ran into problems with an MFC application that was hosting some Windows Form user control in a modal dialog; the application hanged after it lost focus. The problem was the window received WM_GETDLGCODE message in an infinite loop making it impossible to handle anything else. After a lot of digging, I found that … Read more
Visual Studio 11 brings many new things for native development, including support for new features from C++11 (unfortunately not all), or ability to write Metro apps with C++/CX including modeling the UI with XAML. In this post I will talk a bit about three favorite features that I noticed immediately after trying VS11 from Windows … Read more
If you tried the Win8 Developer Preview and built WinRT components (native or managed) you noticed the .winmd files. The name stands for Windows Meta Data and the format of these files is the same used by the .NET framework for the CLI, i.e. ECMA-335. That means you can actually read these files with a … Read more
Partial classes are finally available to C++. Sort of. It’s not part of the new C++11 standard, it’s part of the C++/CX language developed by Microsoft for targeting WinRT on Windows 8. Partial classes mean that you can define a class spanned across several files. Why is this great? Because it allows developers and automatic … Read more
Windows Runtime, or shortly WinRT, is a new runtime (siting on top of the Windows kernel) that allows developers to write Metro style applications for Windows 8, using a variety of languages including C/C++, C#, VB.NET or JavaScript/HTML5. Microsoft has started rolling out information about Windows 8 and the new runtime at BUILD. WinRT is … Read more
At the beginning of this year, Microsoft announced a “C++ renaissance”. Quoting from the description of a Channel 9 video with Craig Symonds and Mohsen Agsen: C++ is currently undergoing a renaissance. This means that, by definition, the language, compilers and compositional tooling are evolving and coalescing into a state that maximizes native developer efficiency, … Read more
Finding applications installed on a machine (the ones that you see in Control Panel Add/Remove programs) could be a little bit tricky, because there isn’t a bulletproof API or method. Each of the available methods has its own weak points. WMI is slow and can actually be disabled on a machine. MSI API only shows … Read more
A window’s system menu (now called simply window menu) features by default commands like Move, Size or Close. (When the user selects one of these commands a WM_SYSCOMMAND message is sent to the window.) What if you want to remove and add these commands on the fly? Here is how you can do it. This … Read more