Update of Article “Determine Windows Version and Edition”

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…

End of Bill Gates’ Era?

According to a Mexican finacial publication cited by The Guardian, Bill Gates is no longer the richest man on the planet. The new richest man is the Mexican businessman Carlos Slim Helu Aglamaz. Most of his business is in communication, and the surge in the shares of America Movil group put him on the top spot. It remains…

Vista Aero’s Menus Hiding with MFC 9.0

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…

File Dialogs in MFC 9.0

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…

Syslink Control in MFC 9.0

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….

Don’t Post Like This

Being active on large communities such as CodeGuru or MSDN forums I see every day people asking question in the worst possible manner; questions that simply can’t be answered because they are either very ambiguous or ar lacking any useful information about the problem. Some time ago I decided to make a list os such questions….

Case Insensitive Strings

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…

Finding an Item in a CTreeCtrl

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…

UNICODE support in the C++ Standard

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…