C++/Win32: Sounds

This might be the shortest lesson of all. All I want to do here is play a sound. Why? Well in the cast of a port scanner, the user is probably looking for open ports on a system. The majority of the ports scanned will be closed, and he/she might be looking over 8000 ports for the few that will be open. The user might better occupy his time doing something, anything, besides staring at our application. So a sound alert might be a nice option. Read more

C++/Win32: List Views

At this point, we’ve done a lot. Over the past sixteen lessons, we’ve made our app do what it’s supposed to do, and just recently we made it print and save its output. For some strange reason, we’re still not completely bored and over this thing, so we’re trying to figure out how to make it better. Read more

C++/Win32: Working With Files

If you’ve made it this far, you’ve been introduced to some pretty hectic stuff. The nice thing about that is that by comparison, working with files is going to seem ridiculously easy. And part of that is because Microsoft has done a lot of the hard work for you. And why shouldn’t they? Almost every program you use works with files in one way or another. Read more

C++/Win32: The System Tray and Balloon Tips

Good news! We are going to again break away from the standard Win32 stuff and explore something fun. Actually, two fun things: minimizing to the system tray, and creating balloon tips. Balloons are those little comic book style dialog bubbles that popup in the lower right of the screen telling you information you don’t necessarily need to react to (”There are updates ready to be installed,” “New Hardware Found,” “The program is still running in the system tray,” etc.) Read more

C++/Win32: Printing

Printing in Windows is a pretty simple task — if you know the GDI functions. Since this tutorial doesn’t (yet) cover the GDI in any great depth, you might want to read up on the GDI elsewhere. We have, however, seen enough of the GDI — namely, the TextOut function — to print the simple text our display box is showing. So that’s what we’ll do for now. Read more

C++/Win32: Dialogs

Dialogs are wonderful things because they are easy to create, and contain some default behavior that you can avoid coding on your own. They are especially useful for retrieving input from the user. Read more

C++/Win32: DNS Resolution

This is another mercifully short lesson. We are now going to fix the one gripe I had with our port scanner about 7 lessons back: it doesn’t resolve DNS. Read more

C++/Win32: Polishing the GUI

This is going to be the shortest lesson of them all, because I’m not going to go into much detail about what I’m changing in the code. You should by now be quite familiar with the code — familiar enough that you should be able to recognize and understand the changes made to it in this lesson. Read more

C++/Win32: Menus

Let’s take a detour here and talk about menus. If you are new to Windows and you’re learning this all for the first time here, you have no doubt been rather impatient with me for taking so long to get to menus. After all, there’s hardly a Windows app out there that doesn’t have a menu, right? Read more

C++/Win32: Window Dressing

When you learn how to program, you are inevitably going to have to learn to program the way whichever author or teacher you are receiving your information from does. Nine lessons into this tutorial, you should be pretty aware of the way I program. Read more

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