i've been Googling this off and on for a few days, but i am trying to discover what one needs to obtain real-time quotes from the stock markets programatically. Note - i am not talking about screen-scraping a website that is delayed 20 minutes... i'm talking about connecting to a service that provides immediate real-time quotes. i'm guessing that such a service would be expensive to obtain access to, but i'm curious. Thanks for the help! Any pointers/tips in the right direction is also appreciated.

We've got an application i'm working on that utilizes COM Variants and Excel (values are read in from a text file and output into Excel). Everything is hunky dory when the user is under US International Settings. However, when our European friends try out the product, there are some strange results - one of which i'm curious about here. The process works like this: we read in some data, send it to Excel, read it back out (probably not the most efficient, but it handles some interpretation of the data we need rather effectively and my boss keeps me on a tight budget, so i just stick to what is quickest to do), format the data according to user specifications, and save it back into the Excel file. The problem is what Excel says about international data when it is read back out - in particular, international numbers. To demonstrate, here is what happens in the US: Value: 1,000.00 -> Read in as a number in the VARIANT object -> Output to Excel correctly. In Germany: Value: 1.000,00 (notice the number formatting change) -> Read in as a BSTR(!) in the VARIANT object -> Output to Excel as text instead of a number. i've monkied around setting my Regional settings to Germany, etc., but no luck. Any advice on this one? COM seems to want to stay whitebread American, and i'm having trouble broadening its horizons. Thanks! -- modified at 10:34 Tuesday 4th October, 2005

Hi all, i am working on an application that interacts with a print driver. However, when i use the Win32 API calls (EnumJobs, etc.) to determine what file was printed and where it was located, i can only get the file name (not the path). In some cases, i will need to do some examination of the contents of a file - so i need the path. Does anyone know how to obtain such a thing (i fear it doesn't exist)?

Thx leppie... i downloaded all those proggies off that page... good stuff. i DID manage to finally find my problem. i was referencing the debug dll's for the assemblies (wrong), co i changed it to reference the assembly projects (right). i could have used the release dll's i guess, but this way solved my problem. Oh well - there's another hour or two down the tubes on stupid troubleshooting errors :) Thanks again for the help.

That's what i initially thought, however, they only reference the base assemblies (System, etc.). There are no custom references defined that these are dependant on. Surely I don't have to copy these dlls... that should be in the environment path... or do i need to set these to copy local? i should note that i had this problem once before... i had to strong name my assemblies and add them to the GAC before it would work. This was a few weeks ago, and i dumped that solution. Every time i rebuilt the assemblies i would have to reregister them in the GAC. Surely there is a better solution (i can't imagine having to do this just to test assemblies)?

Ok, here's the deal - I have two assemblies in a project along with a tester application. The tester application is dependant on (and references) both assemblies, but neither of the assemblies reference each other. I have set up the dependancies and references for the tester app in VS.NET (including setting the references to the assemblies to copy the referenced assemblies local). When i launch the tester application, i get a IO SystemException saying that one of the dll's or its dependancies can't be found, yet if i open explorer and look in the bin\debug folder, i can see both of the assembly dll's along with the tester executable. Any help? This is very frustrating. Thanks!

*bump*

i'm trying to write some custom controls that are outside of the windows-look control box. For example, i would like to write a combo box in which i can customize what the box actually looks like (the arrow button, the drop list colors and selection colors, et al). i'm not using MFC (and i don't want to in this case). Any advice as to where to go? Is WTL the answer? Thanks!

i figured this out... if anyone's interested, the process is to create access masks for each type of access you want to check, and run the function BOOL bAccess = AreAllAccessesGranted(Mask, DesiredMask); and check the return BOOL value.

How can i handle unexpected exits to the program (i.e. a user hits ctrl+break) so that i can clean up memory allocated? Thanks!

i'm trying to write a small win32 console program that will output security for each directory on a hard drive. i can iterate through each ACE in a DACL easy enough, but i'm stumped as to how to figure out what access is allowed by the ACE->Mask 32-bit DWORD value. Any help interpreting this is greatly appreciated... Thanks!!!! "A friend will help you move. A real friend will help you move a dead body."