Marc, Thanks alot,...that is EXACTLY the information I was looking for. I appreciate it.

Very nice photo. Reminds me of my Summer Solstice trip to Alaska this year. The highlight of it was taking our paragliders up by helicopter onto a 6000ft glacier and flying off at midnight. Steve T

Well, apparently, no one has any interest in this subject. I've spent some time exploring the Word.dll assembly, and as it turns out the methods referred to in the above message were alot more easily implemented than I had originally thought. In the Word assembly (which is a huge library) in most of the methods that I've encountered so far, the Type Library Importer attaches a custom attribute (the MarshalAsAttribute) to the [in] parameters of the methods (which is a .NET object&) that apparently is type cast to an ordinary struct (not a struct contained within a VARIANT), so there was no need to write a custom marshaler for any of the data conversions. And, many of the parameters that are required for function calls on an interface or instantiated object are optional. However, the Visual C++ .NET compiler requires an object be supplied for these optional parameters (which override default settings). Weirdly enough, this is easily accomplished by casting Type::Missing to a System::Object using the dynamic_cast operator (or the __try_cast operator, if you'd rather handle the exceptions) and supplying this as the optional parameter. Example: Object* OptionalParameter = dynamic_cast(Type::Missing); Where you want to supply a structure for one of the optional parameters, it must be boxed. There is a help file supplied that describes the various objects that can be instantiated and the interfaces that can be used to make function calls. Unfortunately, the help file is written for Visual Basic programmers, and provides only minimal guidance in writing the C++ code. It does, however, tell you how to obtain the many objects, and essentially what functions you must implement to accomplish various tasks in the Word application. So, as it turns out, Microsoft Word can be automated fairly easily.

According to Stroustrup[^], part of the reason for adding the various cast operators and making them so syntactically ugly was to make them more noticeable in your code. It's difficult to tell the difference between a 'C'-style cast and a user-defined conversion operator. The '*_cast' operators make those sorts of things easier to see, and more explicit of programmer intent. Software Zen: delete this;

Hi NB, From the ShowWindow() docs: Return Values If the window was previously visible, the return value is nonzero. If the window was previously hidden, the return value is zero. And for UpdateWindow() Return Values If the function succeeds, the return value is nonzero. If the function fails, the return value is zero. Windows NT: To get extended error information, callGetLastError. So returning the same value as the wrapped function makes perfect sense to me. :) Neville Franks, Author of ED for Windows. Free Trial at www.getsoft.com

Ya know, I have this extensive list of amazingly dumb mistakes that I was going to post,...but, compared to me ,you guys look like Nobel Prize winners. (Yes, I have made that assignment operator mistake a number of times.) My all-time most embarrassing errors: I ALWAYS forget, #include "resource.h" at the beginning of the source file. ...and, I ALMOST ALWAYS make a number of typographical errors, so, I get the "Undeclared Identifier" error message ALL THE TIME (...it's like an old friend now). Most frustrating: It took me forever to figure out that you must use TWO backslashes when designating the "file path string" with either CreateFile or the iostream library class functions (and I would have NEVER figured that out if I hadn't stumbled upon it in an introductory book on C++, completely by accident).

Christian Graus and Bernd, THANKS! Excellent suggestions from both of you, I really appreciate it. Very helpful. Christian, your articles are EXCELLENT (exactly what I was looking for):-D, and Bernd, I hadn't even thought of XML, but, it's a great idea. I suspect you both saved me alot of time exploring inadequate approaches to the problem.

You know, I kind of posted this inquiry half in jest, becuase it was my understanding that void pointers are NOT cool (and are, in fact, unsafe). I mean without typecasting, the potential exists for the wrong type of pointer residing in the structure. And, apparently, I've confused you guys somewhat, because the author represents much of his technical information on "undocumented internals" as being taken from Microsoft's documentation for the Device Driver SDK. The Feng Yuan also invents soem ingenious methods for obtaining information from OS kernel components (which is theoretically, not accessible from a user application). He does this with Windows 2000 (my machine has Windows 98, and some of the function calls he employs are not available on Windows versions earlier than 2000 or XP). Anyway, it's a long story. And, I'm a novice to Windows systematics. The main reason I posted is that it seemed like a marginal technique to employ for critical kernel DLLs and the systems calls that they provide. If I find out anything interesting, I'll get back.

Thanks for the response.

I really appreciate the response, thank you. The tip about the LoadLibrary function and the website address were especially useful. Thanks.

hi, about casting see to the structure typedef struct tagBITMAPINFO { BITMAPINFOHEADER bmiHeader; RGBQUAD bmiColors[1]; } BITMAPINFO; BITMAPINFO is almost same as BITMAPINFOHEADER casting means int iVar = 1; short sVar = (short)iVar; //I cast iVar to sVar int SetDIBitsToDevice( HDC hdc, // handle to device context int XDest, // x-coordinate of upper-left corner of // dest. rect. int YDest, // y-coordinate of upper-left corner of // dest. rect. DWORD dwWidth, // source rectangle width DWORD dwHeight, // source rectangle height int XSrc, // x-coordinate of lower-left corner of // source rect. int YSrc, // y-coordinate of lower-left corner of // source rect. UINT uStartScan, // first scan line in array UINT cScanLines, // number of scan lines CONST VOID *lpvBits, // address of array with DIB bits CONST BITMAPINFO *lpbmi, // address of structure with bitmap info. UINT fuColorUse // RGB or palette indexes ); .h CBitmap m_bmpLogo1; CString m_strLogoPath; HANDLE m_hBitmap; .cpp ::OnCreate() CFileFind filefind; CString strVal = strCurrentPath +"label.bmp"; m_strLogoPath = strVal; if (filefind.FindFile(strVal)) bLogo = TRUE; else m_strLogoPath = ""; if(bLogo) { if(!m_bmpLogo1.LoadBitmap(strVal)) { m_hBitmap = LoadImage (NULL,m_strLogoPath,IMAGE_BITMAP,0,0, LR_DEFAULTSIZE | LR_LOADFROMFILE ); //| LR_CREATEDIBSECTION if(!m_bmpLogo1.Attach(m_hBitmap)) m_strLogoPath = ""; } } //another function CBitmap bmp //class BITMAP Bitmap; //handle long cx=0,cy=0; CSize size bmp.Attach(m_hBitmap); bmp.GetBitmap(&Bitmap); size = bmp.GetBitmapDimension(); cx = size.cx; //or Bitmap.bmWidth cy = size.cy; //or Bitmap.bmHeight BITMAPINFO info; ZeroMemory( &info.bmiHeader, sizeof(BITMAPINFOHEADER) ); info.bmiHeader.biWidth = cx; // Set size you need info.bmiHeader.biHeight = cy; // Set size you need info.bmiHeader.biPlanes = 1; info.bmiHeader.biBitCount = 24; // Can be 8, 16, 32 bpp or other number info.bmiHeader.biSize=sizeof(BITMAPINFOHEADER); //.. //I never used SetDIBitsToDevice() so i give you another example function //Let's create a new bitmap HDC dc= CreateCompatibleDC(NULL); VOID *pvBits; HBITMAP oldBmp

Mike Nordell, You know, I did accidentally get it to work one time, and I couldn't figure out what I had done. I'll bet that was it, because I did start and stop the logging several times trying to determine what was what. Thanks for that clue, I was ready to kill (an innocent bystander) in frustration. It didn't seem intuitive or even logical, that it should be necessary to stop and then start spying again,...and you would think they could include that in their Help.

Maybe it helps me that English isn't my native language but since the word "heap" does not correlate directly to an object in the real world in my mind then it's only a matter of connecting the stack to one such thing. And visualizing a stack of plates in a cafeteria usually does it for me. Then there are the HeapXXX( ) functions which should also be a hint :-) Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beierhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!

Paul Watt, Thank you, this is exactly what I was looking for. I had done some searching at the MSDN site, but could not find that specific information. What I did find was information about the build process and how Visual C++ scans and interprets the file identifiers and translation units.

Ravi Bhavnani and Christian Graus, Thanks.