About code. Mostly on C++
I’m working on a project to port a 32-bit application for the x64 platform. The first errors that came up when building for x64 were related to inline ASM code, which is no longer supported in VC++ for x64. VC++ has an inline assembler built within the compiler, so you could write assembly code directly … Read more
I recently read an excerpt from Joel Spolsky’s book User Interface Design For Programmers available on his (former) blog. This is a great book about designing user interfaces, with examples of bad and good ideas. I’m getting the printed version and I recommend this to all building UIs. Now, yesterday I had a problem with … Read more
If you are working with COM there are several registry entries that are important and that you need to understand. I will try in this post to clarify them. But before that, let’s enumerate the three possible COM server scenarios. (As a side note, a COM server is a DLL or EXE can contains one … Read more
.NET allows you to expose components as COM and consume them from unmanaged code. There are many references on how to this (and you can only start with MSDN), and I will not talk about that part. What I want to explain here is something different. Suppose you have this interface: [Guid(“2F8433FE-4771-4037-B6B2-ED5F6585ED04”)] [InterfaceType(ComInterfaceType.InterfaceIsIDispatch)] public interface … Read more
MSDN Code Gallery made available an update for the Windows API Code Pack for .NET Framework 3.5 (or above), a library that provides access to some Window 7 features and some existing features in previous operating systems. It includes: Windows 7 Taskbar Jump Lists, Icon Overlay, Progress Bar, Tabbed Thumbnails, and Thumbnail Toolbars. Known Folders, … Read more
Have you tried to print colored text in a console or put the text at a specific position? You know then that STL or CRT does not provide that functionality. Windows API however, contains a set of functions for working with console windows. The list of these functions is available in MSDN. However, to simplify … Read more
The beta version of the MFC Feature Pack (the extension to MFC 9 from Visual Studio 2008) contains an extended dialog class implementation, CDialogEx. What this brings new, publicly, is the ability to set the background of the dialog box to a color or an image. A first new method allows to set a background … Read more
At the beginning of January, Microsoft released a beta version of MFC Feature Pack, an exstension to the MFC shipped with Visual Studio 2008. This feature pack allows developers to create applications with the look and feel of Office, Visual Studio and Internet Explorer. MFC application can now support: Office Ribbon Office 2003, XP and … Read more
Recently Microsoft launched a program called DreamSpark addressed to students from all over the world (though currently the program is available only in 10 countries) that allows them to used for free software created by Microsoft. This includes: development tools: Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition XNA Game Studio 2.0, 12-month … Read more
I’ve seen this question many times asked in forums. Unfortunatelly, not all the answers are ok. A a good wait to find the available COM ports is by using function GetDefaultCommConfig, that returns the default configuration for a specified communication device. Following code shows how to use it: #include <vector> #include <string> // this can … Read more