Latest news!
Have a look at Michael Dunn's WTL for MFC Programmers,
Part I - ATL GUI Classes in the Beginners section (and also at the Part
II). It contains the reference to the newer WTL70.exe, which can be easily
downloaded and self-extracted (WinZip). The article and also shows the
first steps with ATL and WTL. The article is said to be targeted to MFC
programmers, but it is perfect also for those with ATL experience only or
for the "hard-core Petzold followers". The articles are simply excellent. I
wish I could read something like that some years ago, when I started with
ATL and WTL.
Please, do not focus on the text below. It is already very obsolete and
should be ignored these days. It was last updated almost exactly two years
ago (3rd April 2001). I did left the content below untouched only because
some other articles refer to this one (and to record the history ;-).
The article below is clearly obsolete due to the availability of a
downloadable self extracting archive file wtl31.exe
available from the MSDN
Online Downloads page. My thanks go to Gavin Jerman who posted
the notice here, and to Nenad Stefanovic who made the wtl31.exe available:
Hi everybody,
In addition to the Platform SDK, WTL 3.1 is now also available on the
MSDN Downloads. Just go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads,
and find WTL under the "Visual Studio, Tools and Languages" \ "Visual C++"
category.
Enjoy,
Nenad
As far as I know, the self extracting archive file was made
available at 3/23/2001. The size is 317,880 bytes. While the following approach still works, this article is only a
part of history from now on, and it is going to die silently. I
will recommend to Ben Burnett to merge this article into his
Introduction
to WTL – Part 1 where it fits better. The original article
follows.
Introduction
Ben Burnett's article
Introduction to WTL
– Part 1
contains basic information on WTL. The section
Where do you get
it? shows the standard way to download the latest version of WTL
from Platform SDK web site.
This article shows the alternative way of downloading and
installing WTL which is less painful for those with low speed
Internet connection. The result of few steps is the WTL
subdirectory in your working directory. Then you can copy its
content into the usual subdirectory for WTL files like C:\Program
Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VC98\WTL.
Motivation
The WTL (Windows Template Library) contains about 900 kB
of header files. Getting them is necessary and sufficient
condition to start working with WTL. In addition, you may want to
use ATL/WTL wizard — the size of the binary form is about 250 kB.
What can help you at the beginning are the examples. The October
2000 Platform SDK contains four examples in subdirectories BmpView, GuidGen,
MdiDocVw,
and MTPad. Size of sources is about 180 KB.
To summarize, all the needed files have about 1.3 Mb (to have a
full installation of WTL). The cabinet files that must be downloaded
have together less than 1 MB. This is quite acceptable even when having
very slow Internet connection. The problem is that the standard Platform SDK
installation procedure
requires to download much more data. Being connected via 56k or
less modem, it is very painful and time consuming. It could be almost
impossible if the connection line is not reliable.
So, what is the alternative way?
The idea is based on manual downloading of one or two cabinet
files using ftp protocol. This can be done also using
a web browser (like Microsoft Internet Explorer) by just clicking on
links below. You also download one small zip file linked at the top
of this article. It contains single batch file. Then you run the
batch file and you get the WTL subdirectory with all necessary
files. You need to download only 900 KB of data or so.
The steps
Place all downloaded files into one working directory. Nothing
special is going to happen there. Files will only be extracted into
subdirectories of the working directory. Other directories will not
be affected. The steps were tested on October 2000 Platform SDK release
(WTL Version 3.1).
- Download the
ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/developr/PlatformSDK/Oct2000/psdk-common.48.cab
file. It contains the WTL header files and examples. The size of
the cabinet file is about 890 KB. For Windows 9x, see also
text just behind the numbered steps.
- Download the
ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/developr/PlatformSDK/Oct2000/psdk-x86.48.cab
file. It contains the ATL/WTL wizard. It is not necessary, but
the size of the cabinet file is only about 40 KB. So why not.
For Windows 9x, see also text just behind the numbered steps.
- Download the WTLinst.zip or WTLinst9x.zip archive file linked at the beginning of the article. (Extremely
small, only 2 kB.)
- Unzip the downloaded archive file WTLinst.zip or WTLinst9x.zip using for example free unzip utility by
Info-ZIP.
The downloaded archive contains single batch file.
- Having the extracted batch file and one or two cabinet files in
the same working directory, run the WTLextract.bat or WTLextr9x.bat respectively.
-
Warning! The WTLextract.bat will not work on
Windows 9x and the WTLextr9x.bat will not work
on Windows NT.
- Copy the content of the created
WTL subdirectory
to the desired place and ensure that the Include
subdirectory with header files is searched by VC++ compiler.
Isn't it easy?
Notice for Windows 9x:
If you have problems with storing the cabinet files on your disk
because of their names (two dots in the name), store them as wtl1.cab and
wtl2.cab. If you store them
using the original names, the WTLinst9x.bat batch will
rename them anyway to avoid problems with the extract
utility on Windows 9x. The new names are treated as synonyms
for the original cabinet files.
And how does it work inside?
Well, you can look inside the batch file ;-). O.K., here is a
snippet of the internal magic. In fact, it shows all important
actions to extract all the WTL header files from the psdk-common.48.cab cabinet file:
extract /L WTL/Include psdk-common.48.cab *.A1000D79*
cd WTL\Include
rename AtlApp_h.A1000D79_C485_4CB3_8AB0_B6D38ED2B38C AtlApp.h
rename AtlCrack_h.A1000D79_C485_4CB3_8AB0_B6D38ED2B38C AtlCrack.h
rename AtlCtrls_h.A1000D79_C485_4CB3_8AB0_B6D38ED2B38C AtlCtrls.h
rename AtlCtrlw_h.A1000D79_C485_4CB3_8AB0_B6D38ED2B38C AtlCtrlw.h
rename AtlCtrlx_h.A1000D79_C485_4CB3_8AB0_B6D38ED2B38C AtlCtrlx.h
rename AtlDdx_h.A1000D79_C485_4CB3_8AB0_B6D38ED2B38C AtlDdx.h
rename AtlDlgs_h.A1000D79_C485_4CB3_8AB0_B6D38ED2B38C AtlDlgs.h
rename AtlFrame_h.A1000D79_C485_4CB3_8AB0_B6D38ED2B38C AtlFrame.h
rename AtlGdi_h.A1000D79_C485_4CB3_8AB0_B6D38ED2B38C AtlGdi.h
rename AtlMisc_h.A1000D79_C485_4CB3_8AB0_B6D38ED2B38C AtlMisc.h
rename AtlPrint_h.A1000D79_C485_4CB3_8AB0_B6D38ED2B38C AtlPrint.h
rename AtlRes_h.A1000D79_C485_4CB3_8AB0_B6D38ED2B38C AtlRes.h
rename AtlScrl_h.A1000D79_C485_4CB3_8AB0_B6D38ED2B38C AtlScrl.h
rename AtlSplit_h.A1000D79_C485_4CB3_8AB0_B6D38ED2B38C AtlSplit.h
rename AtlUser_h.A1000D79_C485_4CB3_8AB0_B6D38ED2B38C AtlUser.h
The extract utility is a part of Windows. The
options ensure that the WTL/Include is the directory for extracted
files. If the subdirectories do not exist they will be created.
The file mask *.A1000D79* is related to the WTL header files.
The full names of extracted files are visible in the rename
commands part. They are renamed to the original WTL names.
The installation batch for Windows 9x is more obscure because the extract utility cannot find the cabinet files with two
dots in the name, and also it cuts the extracted file names to the
8.3 form. The cabinet files must be renamed first and the
extraction process must be split to more parts because some of the
file names do overlap when shortened to 8.3 form.
I tried hard to use the extrac32 utility instead of extract, but I was not
successful here. It is probably
because the extrac32 is treated as a Windows program and it
is executed asynchronously. If you know how to solve the problem
using extrac32, I'll be glad to accept and embed the
solution here (there still is some place in the following
acknowledgements ;-).
Acknowledgements
I'd like to thank firstly to authors of WTL. My thanks goes also to
Ben Burnett for showing total WTL beginners
Where do you get
it?, to Michael Fink who posted where the ATL/WTL wizard
sleeps, to Mehmet Ozgul who posted the problems related to the
Windows 9x, to John Noland who suggested the 8.3 problem
solution on Windows 9x plus added the commands to extract another
example (BmpView), and to many others who prove all the time that the
lack of official WTL support does not mean that WTL is bad. Finally,
I'd like to thank the one at CodeProject who corrected
my English spelling errors, and spent the time with the updates.
