Programming

Win32 examples with Visual C++

Personally, I dislike programming for Windows. The documentation is awful, the Visual Studio development environment is awful, and MFC is awful. It seems like everything you want to do requires a vision quest over the web and through the MFC source code. It amazes me anyone outside Microsoft has managed to write good programs, and my hat is off to those who have. I'm making this page to publish any useful things I can figure out about Win32 programming.

• rubberBandUtil. This is one way to draw a rubberband line in a CView. The function trackRubberLine(CView *pView, CPoint start, CPoint *finish) takes a CView and a starting CPoint as arguments. It then captures the mouse and then tracks the mouse movements while drawing a "rubberband" line between the start point and the current mouse location. It returns the final mouse location in CPoint finish. It uses BitBlt functions and memory device contexts to give pretty good performance. Here's how it can be used in a message handler:

  void CRubberBandView::OnLButtonDown(UINT nFlags, CPoint point)
  {
  	CPoint endOfLine;
  	TRACE("initial point: (%d, %d)\n", point.x, point.y);
  	trackRubberLine(this, point, &endOfLine);
  	TRACE("final point: (%d, %d)\n\n", endOfLine.x, endOfLine.y);
  	CView::OnLButtonDown(nFlags, point);
  }

  • source files for rubberband lines: rubberBandUtil.h, rubberBandUtil.cpp