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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.
-
Lesson 1
teaches you the basics: how to start the IDDE, open Source
windows for editing text, and compile and run a program. In
addition, the first lesson shows you how to run in debugging mode
and perform fundamental debugging tasks. The example program in
Lesson 1 is a DOS application; however, the skills you learn are
equally applicable to Windows application development.
-
Lesson 2
shows you how to use AppExpress to generate an
application framework for a Windows program. You also learn to
use precompiled headers and to use TRACE calls within your
program to track its progress. Lesson 2 concludes with a brief
introduction to MFC and describes the classes that constitute the
application framework you generated.
-
Lesson 3
Lesson 3 teaches you how to use the ResourceStudio. You modify
the menu and accelerator table generated by AppExpress, and attach
a new toolbar bitmap to your application's resources. You then edit
the source code to make use of the new toolbar.
-
Lesson 4
shows you how to use ClassExpress to add message
handlers to your application. You add handlers for Windows
messages, such as scrolling, mouse button clicks, and keypresses,
then monitor the message handlers as the application framework
calls them.
-
Lesson 5
returns to the ResourceStudio, with which you add a menu
item to open a simple Preferences dialog box. You use
ClassExpress to create a new class for the dialog box and add
message handlers. Finally, you add code to connect the menu item
to the dialog box and to exchange information between the dialog
box and the main program.
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:\sc\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 start subdirectory is your working directory
during the tutorial; it contains the project and source
code that you change as part of the lesson.
- The finish subdirectory contains the project as it
should appear after the steps in the lesson are performed
correctly.
- The backup subdirectory is a copy of the initial contents
of the start subdirectory. If you want to redo the
lesson from scratch, delete the contents of the start
subdirectory and copy all the files in the backup
subdirectory to the start subdirectory.
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.