Cross Platform Thread Wrapper

Introduction There are many open source applications which use threading and are limited to either *nix or Windows because Windows handles threading a bit differently than *nix. I develop on macOS so pthreads is my go to but using it effectively locks me out of Windows because Windows doesn’t implement pthread. Instead it has it’s own thread API. There is a pthread implementation that works on Windows but it’s big, and heavy....

April 5, 2019 · John

Calling Functions in EXE From Plugins in Windows

When writing an application that uses plugins sometimes it’s necessary to have the plugin call functions from the application. This is fairly easy to do on pretty much any OS but on Windows it requires the plugin to link to the application. Sometimes explicit linking is unreasonable. One situation where you don’t want the plugin linking to the application is when the plugin will be used by multiple applications. Windows allows for runtime resolution of exported functions (GetProcAddress) and this is typically used to access functions in a loaded DLL....

July 15, 2012 · John

Wrapping a C library in COM/ActiveX

Introduction Not very long ago my boss walked up to my desk, put a pile of books down beside me and said “Not it”. The books were all related to COM programming. The project he gave me was to create a COM wrapper for an existing C library we had developed. Windows is not my primary development platform, so I was tasked with learning COM and then writing a wrapper around our C library....

April 8, 2012 · John

Windows Acquired

Thanks to a Sigil user (Bryan) I now have in hand a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate. Thanks Bryan for sending me a copy of Windows! The plan is to get RC 2 builds out this weekend.

August 2, 2011 · John