Books from Inside the Walls

Dave Edson is a Windows-programming support engineer at Microsoft, which means he spends his days answering real-world questions from Windows developers who use Visual C++. Dave's Book of Top Ten Lists for Great Windows Programming is a compilation of tips and techniques that he invented or discovered in that daunting job.

As its title suggests, the book is organized into top-ten lists, after the fashion of that other Dave. At a higher level, the book consists of four sections: General Windows Stuff, Windows NT & Windows 95 Specialties, MFC (the book never mentions OWL or any other framework, which is not too surprising, considering Edsons employer), and Programming in C. The last section (Chapters 17 through 22) was written by Robert Schmidt, not Dave Edson, and contains nothing that is Windows specific.

In the 16 chapters he writes, however, Edson presents some valuable material. He covers numerous techniques that I don't remember seeing anywhere else, and for that reason alone I'm glad I bought the book. (Even one such item used in a real program makes this book worth several times its price.) He presents chapters on Windows architecture, resource leaks, common Windows- programming problems and mistakes, MFC tips and techniques, and Win32 and Windows 95 programming.

For example, two of the more inventive techniques are in Chapter 7, Tricks, Hints, and Techniques for Programming in Windows. The first, Create Invisible Windows to Eat Input During Gigunda Tasks, addresses the problem of impatient users. As Edson points out, even if you display the hourglass cursor during a long-running task, a user will often go on a mouse-clicking binge, queuing up events that are processed in rapid order once your program completes its processing. Edsons first solution is to create an invisible window that does a SetCapture and funnels all events to DefWindowProc. Freezing the user out of all mouse input is extremely non-multi-tasking aware, as Edson says, so you and your users might prefer his second approach: Create a transparent window that covers your application and swallows messages, but doesnt use SetCapture. Your user can't create an event backlog, but is still free to work with other programs while yours is busy.

The second technique is Change a Window from a Popup to a Child Window and BackWithout Hacking. While Edson doesn't actually show you how to do this, he does describe a way to simulate it. I'm sure Edson is right, and there is no way to toggle a window between being a popup and a child by fiddling its style bits. But his solution is clever and nearly as good: Create two windows, one a child and the other a popup, that both use the same window callback function. Your program then hides one window and displays the other, and can switch between them as circumstances require different window characteristics.

The centerpiece of the book is the 280-page Chapter 11, Windows 95 User Interface Goodies, a strong introduction to the Windows 95 common controls-- image lists, tree views, rich-edit controls, toolbars, status bars, property sheets, header controls, list views, hotkeys, and spinners. Instead of presenting short tips as he does elsewhere in the book, Edson provides a primer on each control, complete with API details and sample programs. The property-sheet control, which is likely of greatest interest to readers, has two sample programs: one demonstrating the MFC 3.0 support for this control, and another showing a bare API implementation via COMCTL32.DLL. Oddly, neither program is included on the accompanying diskette, although both are listed in the book.

Robert Schmidt's book-within-a-book is well done and presents considerable forward-thinking advice for all C and C++ coders, not just Windows programmers. Schmidt covers issues such as the difference between K&R C and ANSI C, as well as surprises you might encounter when moving to C++. He finishes with his most thoughtful chapter, Reasons Not to Migrate from C to C++. Based on much of the production C and C++ code I see, I hope Schmidts chapters are widely read and taken to heart. Still, the book has its quirks, beginning with Edson's colorful writing style (which he acknowledges by thanking his editors for "letting me get away with so much goofiness in my articles"). Whether you find this goofiness refreshing or annoying is a matter of personal taste.

In almost all cases I thought Edsons colorization was fun without being intrusive. However, I felt he went overboard with Chapters 3, 12, and 15: Party Phrases to Ensure that You Maintain Your Computer Nerd Status, Names of Pets Owned by Windows Programmers, and Pre-IBM PC Trivia. These self-indulgent chapters, while short, dont add enough to the book to justify their presence. I was bothered by the underlying assumption of the book -- that the topics covered can or should be addressed in lists of exactly ten items. This assumption leads to oddities, such as item #1 in Chapter 16, MFC Programming Checklist: Use OLE, which is nothing more than a suggestion to use OLE in your programs, and a pointer to Kraig Brockshmidt's book Inside OLE2 (Microsoft Press, 1994). I doubt that any intermediate/advanced Windows programmer (the stated target audience for this book) still needs this advice in 1995.

The biggest drawback of Edson's book is that it appears to have been rushed through production. I was disappointed at the number of typos (for instance, wierd and anyting on the same page). Similarly, the accompanying diskette, while a useful resource, has its own problems. Only one of the over 20 programs has a .MAK file, a small but needless hassle. Most annoying of all, three of the programs would not compile without errors until I made minor changes that had nothing to do with the still-fluid Windows 95 API. In one case, I spent over an hour trying to determine why one of the rich-edit examples worked, while the other wouldn't allow me to change text attributes. I finally discovered that the defective program wasn't setting the length field in a structure that it passed to the RTF control.

These problems and quirks aren't reason enough to avoid this book, but they're bothersome in a $40 package. Edsons book feels like a useful Windows program that lacks online help and is saddled with a conspicuously ugly icon. Whether that's enough to keep you from adding this title to your shelf is a personal decision.