I did not post this when I was going berserk about pdf (that happened 2 years ago while I was actually working on it), but this time I have layed out a few simple arguments in support of my position. So please feel free to discuss it, if you wish, my state of mood certainly not being the objective of this discussion. Thank you.

Sarajevo, Bosnia

Yes, you are right, the question now: why all people use it then?

Sarajevo, Bosnia

Please get Adobe Acrobat Reader Pro Extended, and see for yourself.

Sarajevo, Bosnia

Well, you've got a point there.

Sarajevo, Bosnia

Good point, Jeremy. Now what I don't understand is that since this format is nothing special and it is closed, when it comes to code, why shouldn't we use some of the open source solutions based on the standards, such as XPS, DejaVu....there are numbers of them. We are only talking about simple plain documents here, right? I believe this was one of those marketing issues, they just took the market and everybody have it now and it would be easy to ditch this in favour for something else, even if it's better.

Sarajevo, Bosnia

Please try to use Adobe Reader to create/edit pdf documents.

Sarajevo, Bosnia

No, I do not work for Apple. I only use Microsoft technology, C++ and .Net. Only iPhone from Apple tho :)

Sarajevo, Bosnia

I really don't understand where all this goes with Adobe PDF, but I always hated that format. I needed to code something for PDF format 2 years ago and saw that its internal organization is really crappy, and seems like out of the line at least. I mean it is a document format code, not a rockect science. It even takes like 5-6 secs at least to open the pdf book, for crying out loud. But even then, I have to download 1.6 Gb Adobe Acrobat Reader to work with it! It is 1.6 Gb!!! I downloaded and installed the whole MS Office 2010, and the whole package is like 600 Mb or so. Why does the whole world uses the format that just sucks? I just hope XPS or any other open standard format take over and really send this crap to history.

Sarajevo, Bosnia

Hello guys, I have encountered a strange issue with Vista, and if anybody has any clue please let me know. So okay, I have a normal dialog with a tab control, it has embedded a few tab pages with controls, this all work regularely on Win 2000 and XP and Server 2003. Now with Vista, one control is a password control, and if I hit CAPS and start typing into that control, there will be a big tooltip notifying me that I am typing with my caps on, bla bla. This is a OS level tooltip, because I see it everywhere on Vista whenever I do the same, from logging on to Vista, to any of the system dialogs. The problem is that when the tooltip disappears, the area below it is blank, I don't see the controls as if they were eraised. This is the problem that the controls does not repaint themselves, I guess, but I don't know why - if I open a Notepad, for example, move it in front of my WTL dialog, and them aside, the dialog and controls are painted regularely. So if anybody has any thoughts on this please let me know. Thank you.

Sarajevo, Bosnia

Haha...okay, thanks a lot, you are right of course. Thank you again.

Sarajevo, Bosnia

Thanks for your help, Mike, but this does not work for me. Now all static controls display a black colored text. Yes, I can change the text and not to get it write over the previous one, but the text is not redish ( RGB(128, 0, 0)) but black. Can I send you the app, it's only one dialog, just a few lines of code above the normal code generated for the ATL exe app? Thanks.

Sarajevo, Bosnia

Hi, I have a problem with getting a transparent static control to draw correctly on a WTL dialog. Everything I do works, but only if the text color is black. Message handler is like this: MESSAGE_HANDLER(WM_CTLCOLORSTATIC, OnCtlColorStatic) Then I have a method to handle it: LRESULT OnCtlColorStatic(UINT uMsg, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam, BOOL& bHandled); and in the code I do like this: LRESULT MainDialog::OnCtlColorStatic(UINT uMsg, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam, BOOL& bHandled) { HWND hWnd = (HWND)lParam; HDC hDc = (HDC)wParam; COLORREF m_crTextColorMaroon; m_crTextColorMaroon = RGB( 128, 0, 0 ); HBRUSH hbr; hbr = (HBRUSH)m_crTextColorMaroon; if( hWnd == (HWND)GetDlgItem(IDC_FILE) || hWnd == (HWND)GetDlgItem(IDC_FILESIZE)) { ::SetTextColor( hDc, m_crTextColorMaroon ); ::SetBkMode(hDc, TRANSPARENT); return (LRESULT) GetStockObject (HOLLOW_BRUSH); } return 0; } So far so good, everything works. I am only changing the color of the controls that will represent a label, the other static controls on the dialog should display text in the black color. So this works perfectly when the dialog gets displayed. Now the user changes the language on the menu, and I do this: SetDlgItemText( IDC_FILE, (LPCTSTR) SomeNewText); and the text gets drawn over the previous text, making it indecipherable. What is wrong with this code? Why doesn't the static controls clear its content before the new text is drawn. If I use SetDlgItemText(...) with any other static control that is not handled in the OnCtlColorStatic method, it gets drawn correctly. Thanks for your help.

Sarajevo, Bosnia

I agree. Even the bigger issue is that even Microsoft asks you whether you want to install something or not, but not the Google toolbar - it updates itself not asking you anything. I don't want something like that in my computer. Another issues is the general gray area that Google is in, I think we are yet to experience the problems when the monster grows up. Check this one: http://www.google-watch.org/bigbro.html

Sarajevo, Bosnia

Yes, Vista is sometimes unstable. My experiences with it: 1. I had Windows Mail that comes bundled with Vista just closes with no apparent reason. It is as if I clicked close on the window, but I didn't. 2, Next thing, and it happend to me 3-4 times in the last 10 month that I am using it, Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition freezes looking dimmed, and no way you can recover it. Even worse, at that time you can not even bring up the Task Manager to kill the process, and this is very strange as it should be available at all times. I have that update for running VS 2005 on Vista installed, so it is not related to that. 3. I select a few files in Windows Explorer, and press SHIFT+DEL to delete it entirely from the disk, it then deletes the whole folder. This has happened a few times, so it is not just a wrong key sequence. 4. Sometimes when I select files and want to copy or move them, I don't have a very clear visual on the files moving. This is really annoying, as my graphic card and computer rendering speed in general is very high. I have no idea if I target the right folder to drop the files to. 5. Sometimes it just doesn't see my DVD device. It says "Device blank" or something. I found in one MS forum that I have to go to Device Manager, uninstall the DVD device and install it again, but then it requires me to reboot the machine. Huh. 6. Many problems with apps and IE/Firefox disappeared after I blocked all instances of Adobe Updater with a firewall , and I mean each and every Adobe application that wants to update itself. Adobe is using many different ways (from running strange named instances to installing the updater under the account that has the permission to contact their site without ever notifying you), so I first thoroughly kill these. Clicking on "Don't notify me about updates" or such, is just a waste of time, it is a check box with no code behind it, it will always try to connect. 7. Many programs are still not compatible with Vista, and drivers too (even some HP printers and NIC cards). Besides that, it works like a charm :)

I see you got pissed off with my post, which is good. Try to take some cold beer, then ponder over it with your head cool.

Don't worry, India will still be exporting the code that sucks in 80% of cases for many more years, but less and less as time goes by. Cheers.

Is there anybody who has a merge module or any other way of deploying SQL Server 2005? The InstallShield site says they still don't have it, and that the users should make their own custom setup procedures, and Microsoft still does not show the way of easily deploy SQL server 20005 Express with any installation. But they did ban the MSDE from Vista, so any installation that includes MSDE and is targeting Vista needs to be changed. Thanks.

Sarajevo, Bosnia

Thanks, I'll give it a try. I am not sure about having debug info in the release build, but I will use it at least for the sake of finding out what the problem is. Thank you.

Sarajevo, Bosnia

Thanks, but nothing to help me there, as it pertains mainly to MFC programming. I think I will have to go through Michael Dunn's article about string encodings, hope to find something useful there. Thanks.

Sarajevo, Bosnia

Hi. The application I coded is ATL/WTL windows app, now everything is fine in debug, when I compile it in release it compiles with no errors, however strings for label and other controls are cut off, it shows like only the first letter or nothing. I get the strings from string table in the local resource, and it works fine in debug mode, I also checked the encoding and it is MBCS defined in both release and debug versions. What can cause this behavior? Thanks.

Sarajevo, Bosnia