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Troubles with Windows SDK

Posted on November 9, 2018November 10, 2018 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

My open-source projects are moved to GitHub

Posted on January 2, 2018April 20, 2018 by Marius Bancila

I used to have several open-source projects available on CodePlex. At the end of 2017, the site was put in read-only mode and it will probably be closed at some point. Therefore, I have decided to move the projects that could still be useful to GitHub.

Version history of VC++, MFC and ATL

Posted on August 12, 2015July 22, 2019 by Marius Bancila

I have tried to assemble together information about the Visual C++ releases, the compiler and the frameworks (MFC and ATL). You can find these on many places, but it is often incomplete or focused on something particular (Visual Studio, C++ compiler, framework, etc.). The table below is the result of this effort. It is incomplete…

Dynamic Dialog Layout for MFC in Visual C++ 2015

Posted on July 27, 2015July 28, 2015 by Marius Bancila

In Visual Studio 2015 MFC comes with a new features (something that has rarely happen in recent years): support for dynamic dialog layout. That means library support for moving and resizing controls on a dialog. In this article I will show how this feature works. Suppose we have the following dialog: What we want is…

GUIDGEN with plain text GUIDs and case options

Posted on July 24, 2015 by Marius Bancila

guidgen.exe is a small utility that comes with Visual Studio and generates GUIDs in a variety of formats. The problem with the tool is that it does not format GUIDs in plain text, which I happen to need many times (in source code, database tables, etc.) and I suppose is a feature needed by many…

Microsoft made C++ a second-class citizen in Visual Studio 2015

Posted on July 22, 2015 by Marius Bancila

Visual Studio 2015 is out and comes with lots of new features and improvements (see details here) but it also surprised me with what I call a demoting of C++ again to a second-class citizen, after some years when it looked like it regained importance at Microsoft. I’m saying Microsoft has demoted C++ because they…

MFC Collection Utilities library

Posted on October 29, 2014January 2, 2018 by Marius Bancila

This project has been moved to GitHub. New location: https://github.com/mariusbancila/mfccollectionutilities C++11 has provided support for range-based for loops. They allow iterating over the elements of a range without using an index.

std::vector<int> v = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5};
for(auto& e : v)
  e *= 2;

std::vector<int> v = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5};

for(auto& e : v)

e *= 2;

However, if you try the following MFC code you get some errors because the compiler is looking for a begin() and end() function…

Visual Studio 2012 Debugger Visualizer for CPtrArray

Posted on July 24, 2013 by Marius Bancila

CPtrArray is a nasty MFC container that should not be used. However, if you deal with legacy code you may not have a choice and have to work with it. Unfortunately, the Visual Studio debugger is not able to display its elements, since these are pointers to void and that can be anything. In this…

Bindings for DataGridView hosted in an MFC application

Posted on June 6, 2013 by Marius Bancila

A WinForms DataGridView control has the ability to automatically generate its columns and populate from a specified data source (which can be a DataSet, a simple list or something else). All you have to do is something like this:

var list = new List<Record>() {new Record() {Id = 1, Name = "item 1", Date = DateTime.Now}};

this.dataGridView.AutoGenerateColumns = true;
this.dataGridView.DataSource = list;

var list = new List<Record>() {new Record() {Id = 1, Name = "item 1", Date = DateTime.Now}};

this.dataGridView.AutoGenerateColumns = true;

this.dataGridView.DataSource = list;

When you do the same in MFC, it doesn’t work (supposing that you followed all…

Second CDatabase bug in MFC in Visual Studio 2012

Posted on March 6, 2013June 13, 2013 by Marius Bancila

I was writing recently about an MFC bug in CDatabase class in Visual Studio 2012. In the meanwhile I have stumbled upon an even greater bug (check this report on Connect for the details): when the OpenEx function fails (wrong credentials, service not reachable, machine is shot down etc.) it corrupts memory. What happen next…

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