Tips, Tricks, & Updates

Check this page regularly for neat things we've just discovered (or just decided to tell you about) and announcements, fixes and updates related to Kate's books.

Tips and Tricks

• Using MFC command routing can make dynamic messaging between non window classes easy. We have updated the finger client from Kate's book Building Internet Applications with Visual C++ so that it uses command routing instead of window message passing. It's a bit large for this section, so we gave it its own page.
• Looking for a mailing list that discusses your favourite obscure topic? Check the Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists Indices, a indexed version of Stephanie Da Silva's PAML, to see if there is a list that's perfect for you.
• If you include the attributes HEIGHT and WIDTH on all your IMG tags in an HTML document, the browser will display the text on the page before the images are loaded, because it will know the size of each image. This allows users to start reading data on the page before the images are all loaded, so even if you have a lot of images the user is not stuck waiting for them to load. This will not interfere with old browsers -- at worst they will just ignore the attributes. You will not believe how much faster your pages appear to load with this simple change.

Updates

• In Kate's recent book Building Internet Applications with Visual C++, there is a problem when compiling the QSend program (chapter 14) under VC++ 4.0. Microsoft made changes to MFC in 4.0 that took away a public member variable we were using. Use this new mainfrm.cpp to fix the problem.