An Application Framework

	Chapter 4 - Advanced Visual C++ Features
	Visual C++ 6: The Complete Reference
	Chris H. Pappas and William H. Murray, III

Copyright 1998 The McGraw-Hill Companies

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	Chapter 4: Advanced Visual C++ Features

	Overview

	The Microsoft Visual C++ compiler includes several advanced tools that are useful for program development. This chapter examines the creation of bitmaps, cursors, and icons from within the Visual C++ integrated development environment (IDE), and it discusses several stand-alone utilities, such as Books Online, Spy++, Process Viewer, and WinDiff.

	As you begin developing programs in C, C++, and Windows, you will find that the Visual C++ compiler helps you locate syntax errors during the build (compile and link) operation. Syntax errors are often the easiest errors to fix because of the detailed help provided by the online help facilities. However, just because an application is free of syntax errors does not mean that it will perform as expected.

	Perhaps you wanted to print the time to the screen, but it didn’t show up; or perhaps you wanted to see a file in a particular format, but you got it in another format. Maybe the screen was supposed to have a blue background with a white figure drawn on it, but what you got was a white screen and a white figure—kind of difficult to see. It may even be a performance issue: The program runs correctly when it is the only application loaded, but it crashes if more than one program is running. All of these situations fall outside the scope of simple syntax errors. Advanced development tools are needed to correct these problems.

	This chapter introduces you to the tools designed to help locate these types of problems. You will learn the purpose of each tool and how to use it. As you work through the programming examples later in this book, you will find these toolsvery useful.

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