using wxwidgets 2.8 with GCC 4.6.2 under windows 8
Problem: Does the wxwidgets framework have any class/functions to access file attributes, specifically the HIDDEN attribute?
Things I have already tried:
I know I can use the WIN32 api's SetFileAttributes but I do not want to adopt that as I would like to keep the code cross-platform.
I have already checked classes under wx such as: wxFile, wxFileName and functions under filefn.h but could not find anything.
Any help/suggestion would be much appreciated.
No, wxFileName doesn't have any support for this. "Hidden" attribute under Windows is really Windows-specific, so there is really nothing wrong with using Windows ::GetFileAttributes() to test for it.
But having a method in wxFileName testing doing this under Windows and checking if the first character of the filename is a dot under Unix would be still useful, and not really difficult to implement, so if, by chance, you feel like adding it, please feel free to contribute it to wxWidgets.
Related
Is it a good idea to use gtkmm gui toolkit for some desktop client application ?
Is this toolkit stable and is there enough documentation online ?
I used gtkmm to write professional applications and yes you can use it for real world software development.
But I also used C/GTK+ and C++/Qt and my opinion is that using Gtkmm you have the feeling that the original toolkit was meant to be used in C and the porting to C++ is ok but in many cases you feel that C++ features could have been used better.
For Comparison:
If you have to choose between Gtk and Gtkmm go for Gtkmm even though you might find yourself stuck in some not well documented or supported function. Eventually you always manage to find a solution (you can check the source code) and c++ is way better then c.
If you have to choose between Gtkmm and Qt, go for Qt. There is a HUGE gap between the two. Not only in the toolkit itself but in the documentation and all the other classes that you need when writing an application.
I started two month ago with gtkmm. I actually port a tcl/tk application and it feels very hard for my to get the things run. The only useful documentation I found is the https://developer.gnome.org/gtkmm-tutorial/3.4/
But many things described in the manual are not working! I actually run into trouble while overriding signal handlers which should work but didn't. Maybe you will take a look in gtkmm-list#gnome.org to find out what kind of problems yo will maybe run in :-)
The docs derived from the doxygen input seems useless for me, because the functions are mostly not described and the parameter names or often not very clear to me.
In comparison to tcl/tk the interface looks inconsistent. Sometimes a parameter must be provided by a text, sometimes by a pointer and sometimes by the native value itself. Especially the menus are very "mysterious" with the string based configuration. The need of having parameters as text is very unhandy! You have to convert the parameter with ostrstream into a text and parse the parameters sometimes yourself from text to real values.
I decided to give gtk+ a chance is the existence of the c++ interface. I thought it would be helpful to get the errors in compile time and not while running the app like with tcl/tk. But this is not the always true with gtkmm. With gtkmm you are also able to run into run time errors because all string parameters will be parsed during run time! This makes the things error prone!
Maybe I will start again and give Qt a chance. But a first view on it shows, that this seems not really better :-)
Writing a gui application still is a really annoying job!
gtkmm is a official supported binding of GTK (gtk.org/language-bindings.php).
"inkscape" and "ardour" are notable applications written in gtkmm
The bindings that are official GNOME Bindings follow the GNOME release schedule which guarantees API stability and time-based releases.
If you want to write your Application in C, go with GTK+ (and the GLib).
You can find a link to the documentation at http://www.gtkmm.org/ (https://developer.gnome.org/gtkmm-tutorial/).
With Glade (and ie. PyGTK) you could rapid prototype your application.
Building a GUI with Glade is easy and the resulting UI is a xml file, that is not bound to a programming language.
I'm working on an application using OpenGL and C++ that parses some structured input from a file and displays it graphically. I'd like to start an Open File dialog when the application loads to allow the user to choose the file they want to have displayed. I haven't been able to find what I need on the web. Is there a way to achieve this in C++? If so, how? Thank you in advance.
You have two choices, a quick one, and a good one:
Quick and pretty simple, use the Navigation Services framework from Carbon and NavCreateGetFileDialog(). You'll be done quick, and you'll have to learn almost nothing new, but your code won't run in 64-bit (which Apple is pushing everyone towards) and you'll have to link the Carbon framework. Navigation Services is officially removed in 64-bit, and is generally deprecated going forward (though I expect it to linger in 32-bit for quite a while).
A little more work the first time you do it (because you need to learn some Objective-C), but much more powerful and fully supported, wrap up NSOpenPanel in an Objective-C++ class and expose that to your C++. This is my Wrapping C++ pattern, just backwards. If you go this way and have trouble, drop a note and I'll try to speed up posting a blog entry on it.
To add to what Rob wrote:
Unfortunately, there's no simple equivalent to Windows's GetOpenFileName.
If you use Carbon: I don't really think NavCreatGetFileDialog is easy to use... you can use this code in the CarbonDev to see how to use it. The code there returns CFURLRef. To get the POSIX path, use CFURLGetFileSystemReprestnation.
That said, I recommend you to use Cocoa. Rob will write a blog post how to use NSOpenPanel from GLUT :)
I am considering using smartwin for a Windows platform only C++ project but notice that there has not been a release for 18months since 2.0rc5 was released i.e. it appears that it is no longer maintained.
After playing with it seems pretty good, I like it's use of templates, signals/slots (via boost) and it will meet the project needs but I would like some experiences of other users who are currently using it to help me weight it up?
Have you looked at Qt instead? I think it has a lot of the features you're looking for, and would be much better supported, both in developer tools and framework maturity.
"...we really don't need a full application framework or cross platform portability - just a lite Win32 GUI framework that can be easily added to an existing app "
That is exactly what Smartwin was created for. Combine that with the Sally IDE, and you'll have a complete RAD development environment that is fast compact and complete. Note that Google is currently using WTL for their Chrome browser, but Smartwin is even more efficient than WTL.
Smartwin Also has a library called Winelib that they hope will make this also a portable environment in the long term.
Personally, if you want to go portable, I'd go with wxWidgets. However, if you are planning for sure to stay with windows, I'd certainly give Smartwin++ a look.
I, myself, would use wxWidgets, as thats what I usually use and am used to, so thats kind just a personal choice.
Good Luck.
-Donald
Consider using wxWidgets. It is mature, well supported library with lots of features.
Went for WTL in the end and that's been a pretty seamless and painless transition. Thanks for the comments and responses everyone.
Ultimate++
http://www.ultimatepp.org/
We currently maintain a suit of MFC applications that are fairly well designed, however the user interface is beginning to look tired and a lot of the code is in need quite a bit of refactoring to tidy up some duplication and/or performance problems. We make use of quite a few custom controls that handle all their own drawing (all written using MFC).
Recently I've been doing more research into Qt and the benefits it provides (cross-platform and supports what you might call a more "professional" looking framework for UI development).
My question is - what would be the best approach to perhaps moving to the Qt framework? Does Qt play nice with MFC? Would it be better to start porting some of our custom controls to Qt and gradually integrate more and more into our existing MFC apps? (is this possible?).
Any advice or previous experience is appreciated.
In my company, we are currently using Qt and are very happy with it.
I personnally never had to move a MFC-app into using the Qt framework, but here is something which might be of some interest for you :
Qt/MFC Migration Framework
Qt/MFC Migration Framework
It's part of Qt-Solutions, so this means you'll have to buy a Qt license along with a Qt-Solutions license. (edit: not any more)
I hope this helps !
(This doesn't really answer your specific questions but...)
I haven't personally used Qt, but it's not free for commercial Windows development.
Have you looked at wxWindows which is free? Nice article here. Just as an aside, if you wanted a single code base for all platforms, then you may have to migrate away from MFC - I am pretty sure (someone will correct if wrong) that MFC only targets Windows.
One other option would be to look at the Feature Pack update to MFC in SP1 of VS2008 - it includes access to new controls, including the Office style ribbon controls.
It's a tricky problem, and I suspect that the answer depends on how much time you have. You will get a much better result if you port your custom controls to Qt - if you use the QStyle classes to do the actual drawing then you'll end up with theme-able code right out of the box.
In general, my advice would be to bite the bullet and go the whole way at once. Sure, it might take longer, but the alternative is to spend an age trying to debug code that doesn't quite play ball, and end up writing more code to deal with minor incompatibilities between the two systems (been there, done that).
So, to summarise, my advice is to start a branch and rip out all your old MFC code and replace it with Qt. You'll get platform independence (almost) for free, and while it will take a while, you'll end up with a much nicer product at the end of it.
One final word of warning: make sure you take the time to understand the "Qt way of doing things" - in some cases it can be quite different to the MFC approach - the last thing you want to do is to end up with MFC-style Qt code.
I have lead a team doing this kind of thing before (not MFC to QT but the principles should work).
First we documented the dialogs and what their inputs, controls and outputs were. Also, we create several test cases especially for any clever logic inside the GUI.
Sometimes we had to refactor some business logic to provide a clean interface the GUIs but this is the way it should have been done in the first place tbh.
Now we had a list of GUIs, inputs, outputs, tests and an interface that the encapsulated GUI had to match.
We began, project by project, to create equivilant GUIs to the old ones. Once we did that we could slot the GUI in where the old one was, rebuild and test it. At first we tripped a lot but we soon worked out the common errors and fixed them. We navigated (I think) 612 dialogs although there was a team of about a dozen of us working on it.
I see many user interface control libraries for .NET, but where can I get similar stuff for win32 using simply C/C++?
Things like prettier buttons, dials, listviews, graphs, etc.
Seems every Win32 programmers' right of passage is to end up writing his own collection. :/
No MFC controls please. I only do pure C/C++. And with that said, I also don't feel like adding a multi-megabyte framework to my application just so that I can have a prettier button.
I apologize for leaving out one tiny detail, and that is that my development is for Windows Mobile.
So manifest files are out.
I just notice how many developer companies have gone crazy with making pretty looking .NET components and wondered where the equivalent C/C++ Win32 components have gone?
I read about how many people ended up writing their own gradient button class, etc. So you would think that there would be some commercial classes for this stuff. It's just weird.
I'll take a closer look at QT and investigate its GUI support for such things. This is the challenge when you're the one man in your own uISV. No other developers to help you "get things done".
I've used Trolltech's Qt framework in the past and had great success with it:
In addition, it's also cross-platform, so in theory you can target Win, Mac, & Linux (provided you don't do anything platform-specific in the rest of your code, of course ;) )
Edit: I notice that you're targeting Windows Mobile; that definitely adds to Qt's strength, as its cross-platform support extends to WinCE and Embedded Linux as well.
The Code Project has lots of UI controls for C/C++
Most of them are focussed on MFC or WTL but there are some that are pure Win32.
As an aside if you're not using a framework, you really should consider WTL over pure Win32. It's low overhead and about a million times more productive.
For prettier buttons, etc., if you aren't already doing it, embed an application manifest so that your program is linked to version 6 of the common controls library. Doing so will get you the Windows XP- or Vista-styled versions of the standard Windows controls.
If you want types of controls beyond what Windows offers natively, you'll likely have to either write it yourself or be more specific about what kind of control you are looking for.
I you don't mind using the MFC libraries you should try the Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack
Stingray
CodeJock - Toolkit Pro for MFC/ C++
The MFC feature pack is derived from BCGSoft components.
Using winAPI's you can do almost anything you want and really fast too. It takes some time to figure it out but it works. Go to MSDN, lookup MessageBox(), check out DialogBox() and go from there.
I personally do not care for MFC by the way. If you want to use an MFC like approach I'd recommend Borland's C++ Builder. Pretty old but still very usefull I think.