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9. Introduction to the Tutorial

Welcome to Digital Mars C++. This section of the manual contains a tutorial designed to introduce you to the important components and features of the Integrated Development and Debugging Environment (IDDE) -- the "shell" within which most of your application development takes place.

The tutorial is designed to complement Part Two, "Creating an Application with Digital Mars C++." The tutorial provides a quick tour of the IDDE that shows you how to perform the most common tasks. Part Two contains more in-depth information, to show you procedures for less common tasks and alternative ways of accomplishing things.

Prerequisite Knowledge

This tutorial assumes that you are familiar with the Windows environment -- that you can start applications from the Program Manager, move and resize windows, operate menus and dialog boxes, and perform simple text editing tasks (such as cut, copy, and paste). The tutorial also assumes some familiarity with C, C++, and Windows programming basics. You need not know anything about the Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) library; MFC basics are introduced here.

For more information, consult the references listed in Chapter 1, Introducing Digital Mars C++.

The Tutorial Application

The application built in the tutorial lets you read and navigate through hypertext. Two versions are built: a DOS version (in Lesson 1) and a Windows 3.1 version (in Lessons 2-5). Most of the code for the application has been written; the tutorial just shows you certain stages in the development process to familiarize you with IDDE tools.

The hypertext files that the tutorial applications accept as input are text files containing simple commands that control document formatting and show images as well as commands that define links to other such documents. The markup language recognized by the tutorial applications, referred to throughout the tutorials as TML, is a subset of the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). HTML is a format that has become a standard for information interchange on the World-Wide Web (WWW), a distributed hypermedia system accessible through Internet connections.

Special WWW browser programs enable users worldwide to access and share text, graphics, audio, and other data. The tutorial applications only hint at the richness of full-featured WWW browsers. The DOS TML Reader built in Lesson 1 is called TMLDOS; the Windows version of Lessons 2 through 5 is called TMLRead.

Tutorial Structure

The tutorial comprises five lessons that include instructions for performing various tasks. Following these instructions will teach you basic procedures and familiarize you with IDDE tools. Each lesson builds on concepts and procedures introduced in previous lessons, so it is best to work through the lessons in order.

Tutorial Source Code

The source code for the tutorial is located in samples\tutorial, under the directory in which you installed Digital Mars C++ (by default, this is c:\dm\samples\tutorial). The samples\tutorial directory contains a subdirectory corresponding to each lesson (these subdirectories are named lesson1, lesson2, lesson3, lesson4, and lesson5).

Each lesson's subdirectory (except lesson2) contains three subdirectories, named start, finish, and backup.

The subdirectory for Lesson 2 contains only a finish subdirectory. The start subdirectory is created as part of the lesson.

The source and executable of the final DOS version of the TML Reader is contained in tutorial\tmldos. The source and executable of the final Windows version is located in tutorial\tmlread.

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