24. Application and Class Wizards

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

Books Online
Books Online (found either in the Visual C++ IDE Help menu or in the Visual C++ group) has an easy-to-use graphical interface that allows you to access hundreds of pages of Microsoft magazine and book articles. Figure 4-7 shows the initial Books Online window. (Your window might look different, depending on the latest update supplied with your compiler.)
Figure 4-7: The initial Books Online window
Notice that each entry has a closed-book icon followed by the book’s title. Take a moment to study the previous figure, making a mental note of those books you feel you might need to refer to in the near future. Part of doing an efficient topic search, such as looking up keywords or C/C++ topics, involves knowing the type of information that is available.
Beginning a Topic Search from the Contents Window
One way to do a topic search is to first double-click on the book title you are interested in. Figure 4-8 illustrates what happens to the Books Online window when you double- click on the What’s New | What’s New For Visual C++ Version 6.0 book title.
Figure 4-8: Preparing to examine a reference source
When you double-click on a book’s title, the graphical display of the Books Online dialog box changes. First, the closed-book icon to the left of the book’s title turns into an open book. Listed underneath the title is an expanded drop-down list of associated titles.
Notice that the subtitle’s icon changes to an open book. Listed underneath this subtitle are all the names for the pages or chapters available. At this point, once you have found a page or chapter of interest, simply double-click on the item’s title. Figure 4-9 shows the Visual C++ home page.
Figure 4-9: A new title is brought to foreground
Beginning a Topic Search Using Search
A second approach to executing a search begins with double-clicking on the Help | Search button. When you select this option, the dialog box presents you with a standard Windows Search dialog box, shown in Figure 4-10. This figure shows the dialog box set up to begin a search on Visual C++ System Requirements category features.
Figure 4-10: Preparing to search for a topic
Simply select the List Topics button to update the workspace to show the requested topic.
Printing Help Topics
Although it is definitely true that Books Online and its associated views make for efficient searches, the utility pair may leave your eyes crossed. Besides, what if you want some hardcopy documentation, or you want to further analyze something after your system is shut down? For these and other reasons, many people still prefer reading a printed page over staring endlessly at a computer monitor.
Books Online uses a straightforward approach to document printing. Simply use the File | Print Topic command. Books Online will print the topic that is displayed in the active window when this command is selected.
Selective Printing of Help Topics
Often you will not need to print an entire topic, especially if the selected title is an entire chapter. By choosing the Edit | Copy command, you can decide which portions of a topic to print.
First, select the portion of the help text that you want to print. You select text by placing the mouse pointer inside the text window at the beginning of the text you want to select, holding down the left mouse button, and dragging the mouse until it highlights (shows in reverse video) the desired text.
Clicking the Edit | Copy button completes the operation. Copy places the information on the Windows Clipboard. Clipboard contents can be pasted into any Windows-based word processor for printing and editing.

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Visual C++ 6(c) The Complete Reference
Visual Studio 6: The Complete Reference
ISBN: B00007FYGA
EAN: N/A
Year: 1998
Pages: 207

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