ATL Security Update

Posted on July 29, 2009 by mloskot

Those of you who use Visual Studio in daily work have probably noticed there is has been new security update issued for Active Template Library. The Channel 9 also published very interesting webcast in which three engineers from Microsoft explain what’s inside the update for ATL.

Developers who have built controls using vulnerable versions of ATL should take immediate action to review and identify any vulnerabilities, modify and recompile their affected controls and components using the updated versions of ATL and finally distribute a non-vulnerable version of the controls and components to their customers.

Along with security fixes, the update includes one more interesting feature. Damien Watkins announced (12 min 20 sec) that now:

you can include ATL as a kind of header only implementation

I suppose, it may make it easier to port ATL features to development environments produced by parties like MinGW, so users of these will likely be able to use Windows Template Library (WTL) based on ATL. I’m dreaming, am I?

Inside the Active Template Library (ATL) Security Update | Jul 28th @ 10:02 AM

WTL 8.0 Released

Posted on June 11, 2007 by mloskot

Today, Nenad StefanoviÄ announced new release of Windows Template Library – the best robust GUI toolkit for all versions of Windows operating system, for C++ programmers:

This is the best release of WTL yet (well, of course it is, why would we release it otherwise ;-)

New features incldued in WTL 8.0:

Full support for new Windows Vista features
Full support for Visual Studio 2005, both desktop and Windows CE projects
Full support for Windows Mobile, Standard and Professional
Support for Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition
Secure CRT support
New TabView class
New AppWizard options
New Mobile AppWizard
Find/Replace support for Edit and RichEdit
Bug fixes and enhancements

You can download WTL 8.0 at the project page – http://sourceforge.net/projects/wtl/.

New edition of ATL Internals book

Posted on August 29, 2006 by mloskot

Every programmer using ATL and WTL knows that ATL Internals is a must-read book providing comprehensive background information about ATL.

ATL is my favourite library to use as a base for Windows development. It helps to solve wide variety of problems, on both sides: client and server, especially strongly simplifies creation of COM components. ATL-based binaries are very small and robust. ATL is also an underlaying layer for WTL which is a GUI toolkit, light-weight and modern alternative to MFC.

Continue reading →

Automatic Layout of Resizable Dialogs in WTL

Posted on January 20, 2006 by mloskot

Today, CodeProject announced me about new WTL article has been published. This one is very interesting. Till Krullmann explains how to implement layout manager for dialog boxes using WTL in his article Automatic Layout of Resizable Dialogs. The concept is derived from WTL map based on macros. So, Till introduces new macros for that purpose: BEGIN_LAYOUT_MAP() and END_LAYOUT_MAP() as well as new base class for your own dialogs CDialogLayout:

So I came up with a “semi-automatic” solution that pretty much meets the spirit of WTL. This solution is called “layout maps” and is, like all other ATL/WTL maps, based on macros. Though I don’t particularly like hiding lots of code behind the innocent-seeming macros, I found it adequate in this case as it keeps things readable.

Equipped with Till’s tools you can implement resizable dialog boxes with a few steps. Thanks Till!

Using WTL with Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition

Posted on January 15, 2006 by mloskot

After Microsoft released Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition developers started to find a way how they can use Windows Template Library with that free IDE and compiler. There were conducted many investigations. The results can be found on WTL or MSDN forums so as you can see the answer is Yes, you can use WTL with VC++ 2005 Express Edition. Great!

So, to make the solution available to more WTL users Baryon Lee has published a very nice article – Using WTL with Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition – in which he explains complete procedure of how to install and use WTL with VC++ 2005 Express Edition.

Note: Here you can find Windows Template Library Shared Source Licensing Program

Blog-like interface to WTL list

Posted on January 5, 2006 by mloskot

Today, I encoutered a very new for me Web gadget – blog-like interaface to wtl@yahoogroups.com – Windows Template Library support list. It’s really cool! It also provides RSS feed to WTL list, so now I can add it as a channel to my Thunderbird aggregator.

At once, I found WTL list is also available through GMANE gate, by HTTP or NNTP. Shame on me! It’s there since June 5, 2003. Better Later than Never :-)

Here it is http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.comp.windows.wtl