Looks promising at a glance. I've been looking into just what marshaling is about and it's starting to gel, and this will help, thanks. Looking at the Marshal class seems to be just what I'm looking for, accessing the raw data.

I looked at BackgroundWorker after you said it and concluded that using it would require a lot of rewiring of my program, more than I was willing to do. However, I do now know it exists and I'll keep it in mind next time around.

I double checked that several times and I did give all four instances of ToString the override keyword. It's very frustrating that it keeps happening. I also added marks in each ToString to display what class the ToString is being called from and the first three classes are fine, it's just that last one class can't show it's ToString in the combo box like it should. I'll keep hammering at it though, I know it's worked before. I figure I might have a "base.ToString()" instead of a "this.ToString()" or something set wrong like that.

Okay, I understand. However, could I create an instance of XmlRootAttribute, and potentially set some namespaces also instead of using a dummy class?

Could you post the code of the 2 classes, please? -------- "I say no to drugs, but they don't listen." - Marilyn Manson

That sounds like just what I was looking for. I'll check that out, thanks a lot.

Yeah, I ran across that one among other spreadsheet-style controls. I want to show more than just a single text item in a single cell. I found an article on here that describes how to create your own control and I'm trying to work through it now.

You found my error, the troubled code was in my document class which isn't based off of CWnd. I knew I had to have done something wrong since I triggered a debug assertion but I only got that generic error so I didn't know. I'm kicking myself that I didn't calmly examine what was actually different between the two, I was too frustrated with the error to think rationally. I just changed NULL'd the pointer and it works fine, thanks.

You could try using dynamic_cast instead. But as Ravi said, it's not good OO practice. Regards Senthil _____________________________ My Blog | My Articles | WinMacro

I think the CFormView will be fine, I've just broken the first chip off the CTreeCtrl block. As far as the owner drawn thing, I want to do that to a list box, not the tree view from the previous problem, but I have no doubt the list view can be owner drawn. That's for another day.

I'll read that tonight. I haven't optimized the program for space and efficiency yet but one thing I did was to put the grey brush into the child view to be created once on construction, then used repeatedly, and deleted on deconstruction. I also have to figure out a better flow to my program but that's on my shoulders. I'm trying to optimize drawing because it's definitely the slowest part of my program.

I did put a try block around each of 3 sections I have and the exception was caught. The exception gave the reason "A required resource was unavailable." I think the resource is tied to the drawing context instance in the function I'll have to investigate it further. I may have to put my OnPaint function in a critical section and use a single (binary) lock to control the flow. Also, if anyone wants to reply to add in regards to synchronization, I only have one UI thread doing work but it's calling back to the child view to tell it to redraw specific places.

This thread is a user-interface thread, I overrode CWinThread and pass the runtime class name to AfxBeginThread just as the documentation say you're supposed to do for a user-interface thread. I was trying to figure out a way to use messages but maybe I don't know as much as I need to. I defined a message like: #define WM_UPDATECHILD (WM_APP + 1) And tried to create a handler function for that message but it would never be run. I tried to override PreTranslateMessage, OnCmdMsg, and OnCommand to intercept this message, handle it, then return a nonzero result to show it was handled and none of this worked. I just don't know what to do.

According to CMenu's documentation, "[t]he return value is undefined if CWnd is a child window". Try changing the first line to: CMenu* MainMenu = AfxGetMainWnd()->GetMenu(); [UPDATE]: After posting this I noticed you had already found the problem. Sorry. -- jlr http://jlamas.blogspot.com/[^] -- modified at 0:36 Thursday 6th October, 2005

I think I was doing the second way but I must have changed to C-Style strings for some reason, I don't know. I'm using CString's practically everywhere else. I'll take some time and read that link, thanks a lot. edit: I just invalidated the view when the data is changed and it worked like a charm, many thanks. Practically that entire post was very informative, good call.

Thank you for the reply, it's very informative. I looked into a modeless dialog because I doubted I could interface with a modal dialog box. I found the function CreateIndirect(...) but I couldn't close the deal on the arguments so I abandoned it in favor of trying another route which I am not optimistic. I already have a series of handles setup to provide synchronization and I can wait for each event and adjust the dialog appropriately. Can you give me a more detailed sequence of events, possibly with function names and such. I'm having a hard time filling out my CWinThread-derived class, I can't quite define in my mind what should be in my main controlling function and what should be in the UI thread.