From some of the MinGW sites: “ The MinGW basic runtime system, which is basically the glue to the underlying operating system, is completely in the public domain. The runtime system includes MinGW headers (such as stdio.h), libraries (such as libmingw32.a) and import libraries for CRTDLL/MSVCRT. W32API, which consists of the headers and import libraries related to WIN32 API access, is released under copyright . The copyright agreement states no restrictions are placed on programs or object files compiled with the library. Mingw provides access to the Win32 API. Theoretically, if you own the MFC source code you could build MFC libraries for Mingw. No one's tried this so far. If anyone does successfully accomplish it, please say so and it will be added to this document… “ MinGW is the common denominator to link Fortran to C/C++. From what I’ve seen, Cygwin can be used on windows machines as well. For example: g77 -c test.f 2 g++ -o test test.cpp test.o g77 will compile and assemble the Fortran source file test.f into the object file test.o g++ will compile and assemble the C++ source test.cpp and link it to the Fortran object file test.o and create the test.exe executable. I haven’t come across how this can be done with VC++. To the contrary, not being able to do this sort of thing is one of the driving forces behind multi language compiler utilities such as MinGW.

I have Visual Studio 6 SP6 installed and use the VC++6 IDE. I have made MFC apps that run using the VC++ compiler. It is when I try to compile a source (or resource)created using MFC with MinGW compilers that I get into trouble. I have just come across some snippets that indicate that I will not be able to compile MFC source with MinGW compilers since, for one thing, MFC is copyrighted. I'll try again with a Win32 Application project. If that fails, I'll look into some other IDE supporting Win32 API. OK?

I’ve been working up the learning curve trying to link F77 functions and subroutines to C/C++ (Pentium, XP, VC++6). I got stuff to work using MinGW’s f77, gcc and g++ compilers in console mode. So now I’m trying to switch to a dialog GUI. I would like to use MFC. When I got to compiling the .rc file (using windres in MinGW), I started to run into problems. I see that MinGW supports WIN32 API but my suspicion is that it does not work with MFC. Not much on the subject on the net that I was able to find so I would appreciate any perils you(‘ll) can give up. Just a beginner so please reply in a Newbie dialect of English if you don’t mind. Thanks, Mike

I probably don’t understand all the parameters and constraints of Feis scheduling well enough so this is probably too simplistic but with regard to a brute force method, doesn’t the solution resemble a game of Tetris? In Excel, each of the 8 stages is a column and you add to cells the values 1 through 1220 representing the competitor. For example, competitor 111 has 3 entries so on Stage 3 there might be three rows containing 111. Perhaps as you continue adding competitors to stages an algorithm will come to mind that can be implemented in an Excel macro. If not, you would still have time to fill in the cells by hand.

Thanks Moak. I've come to the same conclusion. Others have suggested that a mult-thread app might include 1 for the connection and another for fuctions that could be done in parallel such as sorting, filtering and displaying. This also does not help much since there are not a lot of intensive other tasks to do. I use XHDR commands which is fast and download the article bodies afterwards for those articles I'm interested in. Regards

I have only a modicum of basic knowledge about programming in VC++6. Most of the time I am cold so I program to raise my body temperature by the unadulterated frustration C++ affords. However, this frustration is offset by the learning experience. I’ve written a newsgroup client that downloads headers and articles from up to 10 newsgroups and deletes duplicates. My socket connection is derived from CAsyncSocket. It seems to run OK but since I have time, I was wondering if modifying the code by adding multi-threading would improve download performance. (I don’t even know if that is possible.) My newsgroup server allows 2 connections per host. I connect via a cable modem, only one PC is involved, and no router. My thought was that I might see only a marginal improvement since some delays, for example within the server, would still exist. Regards