This is a small departure from the ATL/WTL threading series I am writing on my wiki.  This is a framwework WTL application that utilizes the MS DataGrid Control from Service Pack 6 of Visual Studio 6.  This program provides a complete COM interface to the control, similar to what might be used in a commercial application.  I decided not to continue with this application in my article series, because you must have access to msdatgrd.ocx and its dependent controls.  However, it's chock full of interesting code that I've never seen published in one location.

I was considering using a grid called TrueDBGrid or VS Flex from ComponentOne to continue the series, but I decided to develop a pure WTL grid component so I can move to 64 bit programming without the necessity of dragging along COM.

Here's a screen shot of the WTL code utilizing msdatgrd.ocx: (The names in this grid are purely fictitious and are included in an Access 2007 example from Microsoft.)

Here's the Visual Studo 2008 project:

WTLLearningApp3-2008.7z (63.70 kb)

(You will need access to the msdatgrd.ocx control and its dependencies in order to compile this code.)

In reviewing the software projects I have been involved with over my programming lifetime: I have noticed that the smaller and more highly targeted a software project is, the more likely it will be completed under budget and ahead of schedule.  This is not a hard and fast rule, and there are a number of mitigating circumstances along with some very visible failures.  The easier it is to get your arms around a project, the more likely it is that everyone associated with the project can understand the expected outcomes.

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I used to gripe about having to update my Boost C++ libraries so often, but these web/.Net things seem to morph by the day.  I am trying to get up to speed on modern web design techniques and so far, I've updated my components twice in the last two weeks.

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I've been wanting to embed video in my blog pages for a long time. A few quick searches on Bing yielded some example html code. Unfortunately, all of the code I've found downloads the entire file to your PC. Even a short MP4 file will be 6 or 7 MB, which takes too long to download for most blog pages. So far, the only practical way to put video on my blog has been to upload to Youtube and then link to the video. If anyone has come across some practical ways to stream video from a simple IIS server, I would love to hear about it. For now, I'll have to experiment on a wiki page to see if I can come up with a practical way to show video on my blog.

I cannot say enough good about Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to (X)HTML, StyleSheets, and Web Graphics by Jennifer Niederst Robbins. This book is a life saver for programmers trying to learn a something about web design. Does it make me an expert? No! Does it help me learn what goes into web design? Yes! Can it help me make my web site better? Yes!

I spent most of the day working on a subtle problem. Firefox seemed to be repositioning the footer on my page whenever I moused over or clicked my navigation list. Using Robbins' book, I was able to isolate and debug the problem. It turned out I had two style sheet anchor elements interacting in an unwanted way. In addition, the focus rectangle that Firefox places on items that are clicked caused the navigation <div> to resize slightly, sending the footer into a tizzy.

Anyway, if you don't know web design, this is the book to start with. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.