Welcome

...to the Not Felix Kasza's Win32 samples page. The focus here at N.F.K.W.S is on all things UI. My name is Chris Becke, and I have articles and tutorials covering the Graphics Device Interface, the window manager and the windows shell. Lots of these are responses to queries in the newsgroups I frequent, most are the products of my own urge to poke about my system and find out how things work.

Table Of Contents

A list of the articles I have written, past an present, sorted by interest. I make no warranties regarding the code samples presented herein as suitable for anything. While the style may be bad I have tried to ensure that the files presented will compile on any C++ compiler that produces Win32 binaries. As I use DevStudio 6 this task is somewhat difficult - please - if anything doesn't compile send email to the contact address below.

Kernel / Base

Rebasing DLLs - The home of NiftyLoadLibrary - and some notes on rebasing dlls.

Graphice Device Interface

Bitmap Basics - A set of basic tutorials on working with the core bitmap structures.

User / Window Manager

The Hello World Tutorial - How simple windows applications can be written.
UI Tutorial - Recipes for using some of the more advanced window controls.
Modal Message Loop - Demonstrates how to implement the message loop for a modal window.
Mouse Capture - Notes on TrackMouseEvent, and SetCapture on Win32.

Shell / Shell UI

The Undocumented Shell - The home of shlext - everything I know (and more) about undocumented shell API's

COM / OLE

webhost.cab [5Kb] - The most bare boned container (I know of at least) capable of hosting an Internet Explorer WebBrowser object. Without crashing.

Direct X

DirectX Tutorial A quick explanation of how to use DirectX in a GDI based application.

C / C++ Language Issues

Removing the c-runtime - Shun the run-time libraries and shrink your applications.
C & C++ Language Tricks - More tricks of use to a coder who shuns run-time libraries.
Linked List tips - Using double pointers to simplyfy a linked list implementation.

Other places to go:

The Real Deal - Felix Kasza's Win32 Samples. There is no substitute.
WWW.MVPS.ORG - The home page of my Hosting Server
Win32 development The so called "offline location" with my old article archive.
Coders Corner Damn its ugly. Its mine, very out of date and in quite bad taste. What can I say - I was young and thought fonts were cool.

Questions and Feedback?

Do you have any questions? I usually hang out on these newsgroups:

• microsoft.public.platformsdk.base
• microsoft.public.platformsdk.com_ole
• microsoft.public.platformsdk.gdi
• microsoft.public.platformsdk.shell
• microsoft.public.platformsdk.ui
• microsoft.public.platformsdk.shell_ui

Feedback about this site and its contents is appreciated. You can email me at [incorrect address deleted by admin], but I ask you at least to consider posting to the above groups first: your question (and an eventual answer) may be of interest to more than just you and me. Besides, while I am adequate with some aspects of Win32, I am hopeless with others; don't waste the opportunity to profit from the knowledge of the other regulars of those newsgroups.

Development Tips

You are a windows developer. You owe it to yourself to get a system that allows you to work effectivly. Thus, some tips:

• Windows NT. Even if you are developing software targeted at the 9X platform, you want your primary development machine to be running NT4 or NT5. This operating system is far more stable as a development platform and has other features that make using 9X a non-option. Which leads me on to:
• the debug symbols. Microsoft distribute a set of DBG or PDB files that can give your debugger symbolic information about all those OS internal function calls you see in your callstack. "NTDLL! ZwWaitForSingleObject@12" is far more meaningfull in your callstack than something like "NTDLL! 7FE9DDAD".
  If you are feeling inspired and want to install the debug symbols but don't know where to find them; you can find them here:
  • On your original Windows NT media in the support folder.
  • http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/nts/downloads/ contains links to the latest NT service packs and associated debug symbols
  • On Windows 2000, the symbols come on a seperate CD titled: "Customer Support and Diagnostic utilities"
• Dual CPUs. Get at least a dual CPU development machine. There are a whole range of deadlocks that do not exhibit in single CPU machines. Also you get a far better idea on how to write software that scales properly to multiple CPU's. If nothing else it makes DevStudio nice and responsive. Also, at least 256Mb ram in your development machine.
• A 21" monitor, and NOT a cheap one. It is prehaps only after you have used one of the better monitors that you realize how much easier on the eyes they are.
• A 2nd monitor. Given that you have just purchased a brand new 21", you probably have an old 17" or 14" lying unused on the floor. Windows 200 supports multiple monitor configurations. All you need is a PCI video card in addition to the AGP card you undoubtably already have. Check in the HCL to ensure at least one of the cards supports multimonitor operation. A 17" or even 14" monitor, while unsuitable for your primary monitor, is well suited to a secondary display role. When debugging - even directX fullscreen applications - you can use the primary monitor for your debugger, while the application runs on the secondary.
• Get yourself the latest Platform SDK. Its available (along with other Microsoft SDK's) online at http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/sdks/. Every service pack, release of operating system or new Internet Explorer version adds new API's & functionality to the OS. The platform SDK is kept up to date, and supports a wide range of technologies that your compiler probably does not.