Marc Gregoire’s Blog

Marius Bancila posted an excellent post on his blog explaining how to define x64 target for you Visual C++ Projects.

If you want to port an existing 32-bit application for the x64 platform (especially since 32-bit processors will soon be history), or if you want to target x64 for a new application, the first step in building for x64 is setting up your solution. In this post I will explain what are the steps in configuring x64 as target platform for your projects. Of course you must have the 64-bit compiler and tools installed to make this possible.

Read the full article.

Our last but one stop was Monte Carlo, Monaco. It’s an interesting city; lots of nice sports cars and yachts 🙂 Talking about sports cars, we saw a lot of my second favorite car, Aston Martins. We didn’t saw any of my first favorite car, but we did in Geneva, so you’ll have to wait for the next blog post in this series to know what it is 😉 On the other hand, we did saw 3 hyper-cars: the Mercedes Mclaren SLR, Ferrari Enzo (in a ‘jacket’ unfortunately) and the Bugatti Veyron, unfortunatelly, we only saw the back of the Veyron for a second 🙁
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Barcelona was our next stop after Valencia. Barcelona is a completely different kind of city compared to Valencia. It’s much bigger and much more tourists. For example, sometimes we had to wait for a while to hop on one of the tourists busses. The wait was never too long, but I’m just wondering how long people have to wait if they go to Barcelona at the peak of the season in July or August. But anyway, when we were there, it was perfect 🙂 Below are some pictures from Barcelona.
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In October, Microsoft will be making a change to the licensing of its Microsoft Security Essentials product. After the change, small businesses can install the Security Essentials on up to 10 PCs for FREE. Previously, it was only free for consumer use. Microsoft Security Essentials provides protection from viruses, spyware and other malicious threats.

Get more information on MSDN.

Visit the Microsoft Security Essentials website.

After Madrid we drove to Valencia. Valencia turned out to be a nice quiet city, at least at the time we were there. I really liked the city. 🙂
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I usually don’t write posts about new technology, but a new technology from Intel might be quite disruptive to current connection technologies. Meet Intel Light Peak 🙂 Gone will be the days of copper wires, Light Peak is an optical connection technology. Up until now, optical connections are only used by data centers that require huge amount of bandwidth and are also rather expensive. Intel’s Light Peak solves all this; it will be cheap and consumer friendly. The bend radius of the Light Peak optical cables is very small. You can bend the optical fiber around a pencil without disturbing the optical path.

Light Peak only provides a bidirectional physical transport medium and is designed such that almost any protocol can run on top of it. This means it could be used to transport USB, DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, Ethernet, FireWire, SCSI, PCI Express etc simultaneously over a single optical fiber! Light Peak also supports quality of service (QoS) and is hot pluggable. Initial bandwidth will be 10Gbit/sec. This is without any WDM (wavelength division multiplexing). Intel claims it is not too difficult to scale Light Peak up to 100Gbit/sec 🙂 To put 10Gbit/sec into perspective (Quotes from Intel):

At 10Gb/s, you could transfer a full-length Blu-Ray movie in less than 30 seconds.

If you had an MP3 player with 64GB of storage, it would only take a minute to fill it up with music using Light Peak at 10Gbps.

If all the books in the Library of Congress were digitized, they would amount to over 20 terabytes of data (a 2 with 13 zeroes after it). If you used Light Peak technology operating at 10 Gb/s, you could transfer the whole library of congress in less than 35 minutes.

Light Peak connections can be daisy chained or can use a star topology and work upto 100 meters, might be reduced to 50 meters for the final product. Even at ‘only’ 50 meter, it’s much beter than technologies like HDMI, DVI, USB and so on.

I’m really looking forward to Light Peak. No more messing around with different kind of cables to connect your monitor or external harddisk or anything else. Just 1 single cable to connect anything you want.

Intel expects to see Light Peak in PCs and peripherals in 2011 🙂

The second stop on our roadtrip through southern Europe was Madrid. Here are a couple of pictures from Madrid.
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Microsoft has released the final version of the Windows Phone 7 developers tools 🙂
The package includes everything you need to start writing applications and games for Windows Phone 7. The package is completely free and includes all of the following:

• Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone – Free edition of VS 2010 for Phone development.
• Express Blend 4 for Windows Phone – Free version of Blend for Windows Phone 7 Development.
• Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 – Rich framework for building great applications for Windows Phone 7.
• XNA Game Studio for Windows Phone 7 – Rich framework that enables you to build great 2D and 3D games for Windows Phone 7.
• Windows Phone Emulator – A hardware accelerated emulator that allows you to run and debug your applications and games without requiring a phone.
• Phone Registration Tool – When you get a device, this allows you to “unlock” the device so you can run/debug your application on it, using your Marketplace account.

Download the tools here.
Read Scott Guthrie’s blog post to get much more details on the release.

According to MSDN, WWSAPI is a native-code implementation of SOAP which provides core network communication functionality by supporting a set of the WS-* and .NET-* family of protocols. WWSAPI is designed to be used by components/applications which fall into one of the following categories:

• Native code mandate
• Require minimal dependencies
• Require minimal startup time
• Memory constrained environments

Using this brand new API, it is possible to make native-code SOAP based web services and clients for SOAP based web services. I wrote an article that explains how to build client applications that use SOAP based web services. The web service that I used in the examples is the Microsoft Bing SOAP API which allows you to search for text, images and so on. The article just went live on CodeGuru. Read the full article.

Today Microsoft released a public beta of Internet Explorer 9. The new version is much better standard compliant and support such standards as HTML5, CSS3 and SVG2. It scores a nice 95/100 on the Acid3 test. I just installed it myself and I’m impressed with how much faster it works compared to IE8. You can read a full review here.
Download it here.

In June 2010, my brother and I made a roadtrip trough south Europe. It took us from our home town in Belgium to Bordeaux in France, Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona in Spain, Monte Carlo in Monaco and Geneva in Switzerland. The roadtrip was around 4400km. I finally made some time to process our pictures and will make a series of blog posts with a small selection of pictures for each city. This first post shows a selection of pictures from Bordeaux.
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C++0x adds a new looping structure: the Range-Based for loop. This makes it easier to loop over elements of lists. It works with standard C arrays and types that have begin() and end() functions returning iterators like almost all STL containers.

Below is an example of a range-based for loop looping over a standard C-style array, incrementing each value by 1.

int myArray[3] = {1, 2, 3};
for(auto& el : myArray) {
    ++el;
}

Note that this example also uses the auto type deduction introduced in C++0x.
Now it’s only waiting until the C++ compilers start supporting it 🙂

Microsoft has launched the following products for business customers:

• Office 2010
• SharePoint Server 2010
• Visio 2010
• Project 2010

“Microsoft’s Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 beta programs were the largest ever, with three times the number of participants compared with the Office 2007 beta program. As a result, 8.6 million people are already using Office 2010 and related products. In addition, more than 1,000 partners are already building solutions for the 2010 set of products.”

Right now it’s available in 14 languages. In the next few months it will become available in 94 languages.

Read the full press release.

Microsoft has just released a refreshed version of the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP. The biggest change is that it is now compatible with the final version of Visual Studio 2010 RTM 🙂

The CTP includes the following components:

• Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone CTP
• Windows Phone Emulator CTP
• Silverlight for Windows Phone CTP
• XNA Game Studio 4.0 CTP

Get it here.

I was technical editor for the book “Ivor Horton’s Beginning Visual C++ 2010“, published by Wiley. According to the author:

I would particularly like to thank my technical editor, Marc Gregoire, for doing such an outstanding job of reviewing the text and checking out all the code fragments and examples in the book. His many constructive comments and suggestions for better ways of presenting the material has undoubtedly made the book a much better tutorial.

Below is a description of what you can expect from the book.

By following author Ivor Horton’s accessible tutorial approach and detailed examples you can quickly become an effective C++ programmer. Thoroughly updated for the 2010 release, this book introduces you to the latest development environment and teached you how to build real-world applications using Visual C++. With this book by your side, you are well on your way to writing applications in both versions of C++ and becoming a successful C++ programmer.

Ivor Horton’s Beginning Visual C++ 2010:

• Teaches the essentials of C++ programming using both of the C++ language technologies supported by Visual C++ 2010.
• Shares techniques for finding errors in C++ programs and explains general debugging principles.
• Discusses the structure and essential elements that are present in every Windows application.
• Demonstrates how to develop native Windows applications using the Microsoft Foundation Classes.
• Guides you through designing and creating substantial Windows applications in both C++ and C++/CLI.
• Features numerous working examples and exercises that help build programming skills.

A few days ago, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010. Unfortunately, for the time being, this final version is not compatible with the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP that was released a while ago. According to Charlie Kindel:

“If you install the retail (RTM) release of Visual Studio 2010 on the same machine on which you already have the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP, you will be unable to build your Windows Phone projects.  Further, while the Windows Phone project type will continue to appear in the File/New dialog, you will not be able to build Windows Phone 7 applications.”

The Windows Phone Developer Tools are being updated and a version that supports the final version of Visual Studio 2010 will be released in a few weeks.

In the meantime, Charlie Kindel recommends the following if you need the retail version of Visual Studio 2010 together with the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP:

• Install Visual Studio 2010 to a VPC image
• Install Visual Studio 2010  on another machine

Note that installing the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP to a VPC image is not supported.

Register here to be informed when an updated version of the Windows Phone Developer Tools is released.

Today, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4. A lot of new features are included. One of them is a completely new editor.

“Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 have something for every developer. The new editor, now using Windows Presentation Foundation, delivers a more flexible, feature-rich environment that supports concepts such as the use of multiple monitors. This enables a developer to have one monitor with code, another with the user interface designer, and yet another with database structure.”

Visual C++ 2010 also includes a lot of new features, some of them are:

• MSBuild and multi-targeting
• IntelliSense and Browsing (#include auto completion, call hierarchy, red squiggles, find all references, class wizard)
• C++ compiler changes (static_assert, auto keyword, lambda, decltype, rvalue references)
• Ribbon designer
• Deployment changes
• Task dialog support
• Restart manager support

Read the full press release here or watch the keynote.

Later this week, Silverlight 4 will also be released to the web (RTW). At that time, an update for Visual Studio 2010 will also become available that will allow you to develop applications using Silverlight 4.

A friend of mine, Marius Bancila, wrote several blog posts with details about new features in Visual C++ 2010.

He touches the following features:

• MSBuild and multi-targeting
• IntelliSense and Browsing (#include auto completion, call hierarchy, red squiggles, find all references, class wizard)
• C++ compiler changes (static_assert, auto keyword, lambda, decltype, rvalue references)
• Ribbon designer
• Deployment changes
• Task dialog support
• Restart manager support

You can read his posts here. They give you a good idea of new features in VC++ 2010 🙂

Now that you know “How To Use the Microsoft WebBrowser Control to Render HTML from Memory” and “How To Navigate to an Anchor in the Microsoft WebBrowser Control when Rendering HTML from Memory“, it’s time to learn how to handle custom URL protocols to tailor the navigation inside the WebBrowser Control to fit your application. The following demonstrates a custom URL protocol called “app”:

<a href="app://some.target">Test</a>

When you would put this link in a normal Internet Explorer window, clicking the link will generate an error because IE does not know how to handle the APP protocol. The name APP is chosen arbitrarily. You can use whatever you want. Handling these custom protocols in your C++ application is actually pretty simple and it doesn’t even involve any real COM coding like in the previous articles. The first thing you need to do is to add a handler for the BeforeNavigate2 handler. Open the resource editor and open your dialog with the WebBrowser control. Right click the WebBrowser control and select “Add Event Handler…”. Select “BeforeNavigate2” as message type, select the appropriate class and click “Add and Edit”. This handler will be called right before the WebBrowser control will navigate to a new page. To handle the custom protocol, implement the handler as follows:

void CMyDlg::BeforeNavigate2Explorer(LPDISPATCH pDisp, VARIANT* URL, VARIANT* Flags,
    VARIANT* TargetFrameName, VARIANT* PostData, VARIANT* Headers, BOOL* Cancel)
{
    const wchar_t* cpszProtocolName = L"app";
    const wchar_t* cpszProtocolSeparator = L"://";

    // We only handle VT_BSTR.
    if (URL->vt != VT_BSTR)
        return;

    // Check the protocol of the URL
    CString str = URL->bstrVal;
    int iPos = str.Find(cpszProtocolSeparator);
    if (iPos == -1)    // Unable to figure out protocol
        return;

    // Extract protocol and check if it's our APP protocol
    CString strProtocol = str.Mid(0, iPos);
    if (strProtocol.CompareNoCase(cpszProtocolName))
        return;    // not our APP protocol

    // It's our APP protocol, so start processing it.
    // Start by preventing Internet Explorer from handling the protocol.
    *Cancel = TRUE;

    // Extract target URL
    CString strTarget = str.Mid(iPos+wcslen(cpszProtocolSeparator));
    strTarget.TrimRight(L"/");

    // Now we are ready to process our protocol.
    // For this demo, I just render a new HTML page with the name
    // of the URL target without the protocol part of the string.
    CString strHTML;
    strHTML.Format(L"My APP protocol processing: \"%s\"", strTarget);
    WriteHTML(strHTML);
}

The flow is pretty straightforward. The URL protocol is extracted; if it’s not our protocol, we let Internet Explorer handle the URL for us. If it is our custom “APP” protocol, we first set Cancel to TRUE which will prevent Internet Explorer from handling this URL protocol. Once that is done, we are completely free to implement the handling of the “APP” protocol however we want. As demonstration I just write a new HTML document from memory which will just mention that we are processing an “APP” protocol URL and that will also display the target part of the URL.

You can quickly test the code with the following piece of HTML rendered from memory:

WriteHTML(L"<html><body>"
    L"<p><a href=\"app://FirstAppProtocolTestLink\">test 1</a></p>"
    L"<p><a href=\"APP://SecondAppProtocolTestLink.Withdots\">test 2</a></p>"
    L"</body></html>");

Run the application, click on the “test 1” or “test 2” link and see what happens.

That’s it for handling custom URL protocols in C++ 🙂

In my previous blog entry titled “How To Use the Microsoft WebBrowser Control to Render HTML from Memory” I described a method how you could use the Microsoft WebBrowser Control to display HTML from memory. One commenter said that it was not possible to navigate to an anchor in the body onload handler. I did some research and it seems all navigation within the rendered page is not working. For example, the following piece of HTML code will not work correctly:

<a href="#n25">Jump to anchor n25</a>
<a name="n25">25</a>

It took me a while to find a workaround, so that’s why I’m posting it now for other people to use. Basically, we cannot use the standard navigation techniques. I tried several possible workaround and the only one that I got working properly is by manually scrolling the window until the requested anchor is visible. It sounds complicated, but it really works pretty nicely. I wrote this little wrapper function to do all the hard work.

void CMyDlg::ScrollToAnchor(const wchar_t* anchor)
{
    IDispatch* pHtmlDoc = m_explorer.get_Document();
    if (!pHtmlDoc)
        return;
    CComPtr<IHTMLDocument2> doc2;
    doc2.Attach((IHTMLDocument2*)pHtmlDoc);
    if (doc2)
    {
        CComPtr<IHTMLElementCollection> anchors;
        HRESULT hr = doc2->get_anchors(&anchors);
        if (SUCCEEDED(hr) && anchors)
        {
            _variant_t index = 0;
            _variant_t str = anchor;
            IDispatch *pdisp;
            hr = anchors->item(str, index, &pdisp);
            if (SUCCEEDED(hr) && pdisp)
            {
                CComPtr<IHTMLElement> el;
                hr = pdisp->QueryInterface(IID_IHTMLElement, (void**)&el);
                if (SUCCEEDED(hr) && el)
                {
                    long yTotal = 0;
                    while (1)
                    {
                        long y;
                        el->get_offsetTop(&y);
                        yTotal += y;
                        CComPtr<IHTMLElement> el2;
                        hr = el->get_offsetParent(&el2);
                        if (SUCCEEDED(hr) && el2)
                            el = el2;
                        else
                            break;
                    }
                    CComPtr<IHTMLWindow2> wnd;
                    hr = doc2->get_parentWindow(&wnd);
                    if (SUCCEEDED(hr) && wnd)
                        wnd->scrollTo(0, yTotal);
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

What it does is it gets a pointer to the document. Then gets a list of all the anchors in the document and get the anchor with the given name out of that list. Once we have the target element, we calculate the offset from the top of the document. This is done in a while loop, because the target anchor could be inside another element like a div or a table. After calculating the offset, we get a pointer to the HTML window and call the scrollTo function to make it scroll to the anchor position.

Now the only thing you need to do is to render your HTML using the method in my previous blog entry and then call this new ScrollToAnchor function with the name of the anchor to which you want to scroll.