Visual C++ 6 Unleashed

By MICKEY WILLIAMS and David Bennett

• Table of Contents
  • Copyright
  • About the Authors
  • About the Contributors
  • Acknowledgments
  • Tell Us What You Think!
  • Introduction
  • How to Use This Book
  • What You Need to Use This Book
  • What's New in Visual C++ 6.0
  • Contacting the Main Author
  • Part I: Introduction
  • Chapter 1. The Visual C++ 6.0 Environment
  • Part II: MFC Programming
  • Chapter 2. MFC Class Library Overview
  • Chapter 3. MFC Message Handling Mechanism
  • Chapter 4. The Document View Architecture
  • Chapter 5. Creating and Using Dialog Boxes
  • Chapter 6. Working with Device Contexts and GDI Objects
  • Chapter 7. Creating and Using Property Sheets
  • Chapter 8. Working with the File System
    • File System Overview
    • Win32 File Objects
    • Compatibility I/O
    • Serial Communications
    • Using Consoles
    • Summary
  • Chapter 9. Using Serialization with File and Archive Objects
  • Part III: Internet Programming with MFC
  • Chapter 10. MFC and the Internet Server API (ISAPI)
  • Chapter 11. The WinInet API
  • Chapter 12. MFC HTML Support
  • Part IV: Advanced Programming Topics
  • Chapter 13. Using the Standard C++ Library
  • Chapter 14. Error Detection and Exception Handling Techniques
  • Chapter 15. Debugging and Profiling Strategies
  • Chapter 16. Multithreading
  • Chapter 17. Using Scripting and Other Tools to Automate the Visual C++ IDE
  • Part V: Database Programming
  • Chapter 18. Creating Custom AppWizards
  • Chapter 19. Database Overview
  • Chapter 20. ODBC Programming
  • Chapter 21. MFC Database Classes
  • Chapter 22. Using OLE DB
  • Chapter 23. Programming with ADO
  • Part VI: MFC Support for COM and ActiveX
  • Chapter 24. Overview of COM and Active Technologies
  • Chapter 25. Active Documents
  • Chapter 26. Active Containers
  • Chapter 27. Active Servers
  • Chapter 28. ActiveX Controls
  • Part VII: Using the Active Template Library
  • Chapter 29. ATL Architecture
  • Chapter 30. Creating COM Objects Using ATL
  • Chapter 31. Creating ActiveX Controls Using ATL
  • Chapter 32. Using ATL to Create MTS and COM+ Components
  • Part VIII: Finishing Touches
  • Chapter 33. Adding Windows Help
  • Part IX: Appendix

Summary

The evolution of the Windows operating system has spawned and supported many file-system types to provide backward (and sideward) compatibility and to provide advanced security and performance (in Windows NT).

Although this evolution is healthy, it does mean that as a software developer, you must be aware of the potential differences in file I/O functions across operating systems and file systems.

The fundamental Win32 file-handling functions are powerful and flexible tools for manipulating normal disk files and I/O devices with a common set of API tools. You can use overlapped (or asynchronous) I/O to improve the performance of your application and to let the operating system implement multithreaded I/O requests instead of having to spawn new threads to handle blocking I/O.

You can use the Win32 synchronization objects with the I/O API functions to provide flexible and efficient waiting and signaling support for your I/O problems. These synchronization objects are particularly useful when dealing with relatively slow communications devices, such as serial ports.

Handling the complex hardware functionality of communication resources can be safely and easily delegated to the operating system. This leaves you with the more pleasant task of implementing your specific application requirements instead of delving down to the device level, as often was required in previous platforms.

The low-level I/O, stream-based I/O, and C++ IOStream classes provide compatibility with other operating systems such as UNIX and DOS. They also can simplify the implementation of file handling and simple text-based applications.

You can use the console window to help provide an emulation of old scrolling terminals and DOS consoles while gaining larger-than-screen-size scrolling buffer support and an ANSI-compatible text-mode display.

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