back in times of using Visual C++ 6.0 we built .map files for our products' binary modules and kept these files for every build that was approved for delivery to customers. if user experienced a crash, all we needed from him/her was crashing module name and address, (and some information about user actions that precedeed the crash) which was provided by Windows. with that we could trace crash to source file and line number using .map file and try to fix it. of course, this approach works only with simple bugs.

are you sure setupapi is supported in windows95? don't forget that if you want the same exe to run on all versions of windows you mentioned, WINVER must be set to the oldest version of sdk (in your case, win95). and there may be the origin of your problem. list of correct values for WINVER must be in SDK docs. when i encounter a problem like this i start from taking a look at where compilation error occured and then searching SDK headers for definition of types that seems to be 'undefined', looking for conditional compilation preprocessor directives around their definitions.

If portability is important for this project then, I'd prefer C# and .NET/MONO, or C++ and GTK/Qt presentation framework. On the whole, it depends on what your team is more familiar with. If new project's lifecycle is longer then 1..2 years then my choice is C#. I also read something about end of Win32 API like that it will be _emulated_ on future MS's OSes (similarly, part of win32 api is emulated in MONO framework).

did you mean 'do they (libraries) have native format'? not, they don't. they are just .NET assemblies" wrapped in PE (portable executable) format. if you are porting .net app, take a look at this: http://www.mono-project.com/ [^]

hello! as we all know, .NET supports localized resources just fine. but when it comes to translation of thousands of strings in all these resource files -- it's pain without good tools that can automate collection of strings in one place for translation, and then distributing translated string back to localized .resx files (possibly creating files for new cultures and adding them to projects to compile). similar approach is used in SharpDevelop project, but they do not publish the tool's sources, only describe its features and the process of localization. and it's easy to understand, why: this tool is fairly difficult to develop and almost anyone developing commercial software needs it. and at last, this is my question: anybody knows of any tools (free or not) with similar features? Alexei Adadurov

I use to do it like this: class SomeClass { public Routine1() { // Show "Wait" cursor (hour-glass) System.Windows.Forms.Cursor.Current = System.Windows.Forms.Cursors.WaitCursor; // reset completion flag workDone = false; ThreadStart ts = new ThreadStart(DoWorkWithStatusChecking); Thread t = new Thread(ts); t.Start(); // in this loop we wait for completion and // processing GUI messages. while( ! t.IsDone this.workDone ) { // If you need to prevent user's interaction with GUI // (clicking around, pressing buttons, etc.) // you can pass message filter to Application.DoEvents() System.Windows.Forms.Application.DoEvents(); // following line is here to prevent 100% CPU load // but some people think it's not necessary // i just dont have time to check it, 'cause it works just fine Sleep(0); } } bool workDone = false; void DoWorkWithStatusChecking() { // This is what you want to do after status-checking. if( this.Status ) { } else { } // ... done, set this.workDone = true; } bool CheckStatus() { // ... real status checking here return ( true | false ); } } // end class SomeClass Note: routine1 is not reenterable and must be guarded by some sort of guard condition in the beginning! got the idea? Alexei.