You've reached the internet home of Chris Sells, who has a long history as a contributing member of the Windows developer community. He enjoys long walks on the beach and various computer technologies.
Saturday, Feb 16, 2002, 12:00 AM in Tools
Welcome to Genghis!
Welcome
to Genghis
Genghis is a set of extensions built on top of .NET and integrated with WinForms to provide application-level services in the same flavor as the Microsoft Foundation Classes. Genghis gets its name as the functional heir to Attila, a similar set of functionality built on top of ATL.
Disclaimer
Most of the Genghis classes were built by different folks and while every effort was made to keep things consistent by choosing .NET and WinForms design techniques, everyone does things their own way.
This work is the work of the individuals involved and does not represent any contribution of their respective employers. You are under no obligation to use any of Genghis at any time, but if you do, you are required to abide by the License.
Installation
You can download the latest Genghis source code from here. The Genghis archive includes this page, the source code to the Genghis class library, a series of samples showing off the various classes and a pre-built, signed version of genghis.dll in the redist folder. Notice that some of the samples use the Genghis files directly instead of using the compiled Genghis assembly. Either usage is supported by Genghis (except where it drives the WinForms Designer nuts).
Source Code Control
Genghis source code control has been moved to the Genghis CodePlex workspace. Thanks to GotDotNet and Rob MacFadyen for hosting the previous versions.
Building Genghis
Genghis is written in C#. Building Genghis requires Visual C# or Visual Studio.NET. Visual Studio.NET solution and project files (*.sln and *.csproj) are provided to build Genghis and all the samples. You should be able to load any solution file into Visual C#/Visual Studio.NET and build the project for yourself.
A NAnt build script (Genghis.build) is also provided. It is used to make the snapshot for Genghis, and is not designed for general use. You may wish to use this file to simulate the snapshot build process; please be aware that you will not be able to properly sign the release mode Genghis DLL (the private key is not provided in this distribution).
For Visual Studio.NET related build issues, please contact the Off Topic Windows mailing list. This is where the Genghis contributors have their discussions, and most of them will be familiar with Visual Studio.NET builds of Genghis. If you have NAnt related build issues, you should contact Mike Marshall (the Genghis build master) directly.
Thanks to Brad Wilson for the NAnt build scripts for folks without VS.NET.Bug Reports
Bugs will now be kept in the Bug Tracker section of the GDN Workspace.
Please do not send Chris Sells or any of the other contributors personal email complaining about Genghis. Also please do not post Genghis bug reports to any mailing list. A much better way to contribute to the life of Genghis is to submit the fix along with the bug report.
Submission Guidelines
- Submissions should be in the Genghis namespace (I don't think we'll have to worry about collisions... : ).
- Submissions should be single-file and stand-alone as much as possible. The goal is that Genghis can be built as a DLL and used as a whole or that bits of its source can be pulled into individual projects as needed ala atl.dll vs. atlwin.h.
- All code should be commenting using C# doc comments so that docs can be generated via Tools->Generate Source Comments.
- All source code files should include the copyright and license notice.
- All code shall be set to use spaces, not tabs, and a vanilla coding style.
- When hacking on existing code, thou shall conform to the existing coding standard of the file. Many coding standards are readable, but not when mixed.
The Genghis Group
This group is made up of official Genghis contributors:
- Chris Sells (9 features)
- Ethan Brown (5 features)
- Horst Veith (2 features)
- Michael Weinhardt (2 features)
- Shawn Wildermuth (2 features)
- Chris Burrows (1 feature and 1 sample)
- Paul Bartrum (1 feature and 1 sample)
- Matthew Adams (2 features)
- Ethan Smith (1 feature)
- Ramakrishna Vavilala (1 feature)
- Shawn Van Ness (1 feature)
- Peter Foreman (1 feature)
- Husein Choroomi (1 feature)
- Dean Cleaver (1 sample)
- Jeff Key (1 feature)
- Mike Marshall (current build master and 3 features)
- Brad Wilson (former build and CVS master)
Who Does What
If you'd got something you'd like to see contribute to Genghis, please let me know (multiple people are free to collaborate on a single feature).
Feature |
Owner(s) |
Progress |
Screen Shot(s) |
Command line parser |
included |
||
Completion combo |
included |
||
Control hosting status bar |
included |
||
Cursor changer |
included |
||
Custom check state treeview |
included |
||
Custom XP theming controls |
included |
||
File Search Engine |
included |
||
FileDocument class (doc/dirty bit management) |
included |
||
FindReplaceDialog |
included |
||
FolderNameDialog |
included |
||
HandleCollector for the world |
included |
||
Header group box control |
included |
||
Image combo |
included |
||
More robust validation ala WebForms |
included |
||
Most-Recently-Used (MRU) files support |
included |
||
MSN Messenger-style popup window |
included |
||
Multiple Top-Level Windows |
included |
||
Multiple-instance detection |
included |
|
|
Path resolution b/w UNC, local (including SUBST, etc) |
included |
||
Retrieving mapped drives |
included |
||
Retrieving shares |
included |
||
Screen Saver class |
included |
screenshot (sorta : ) |
|
Scrollable Picture Box |
included |
||
Sorting listview (including the little triangle thingy) |
included |
||
Splash Screen class |
included |
||
Status Bar Extender |
included |
||
WebCommandLineHelper |
included |
||
Window serializer |
included |
||
Wizard framework |
included |
||
| HtmlLinkLabel class | Jeff Key | included | screenshot |
| User-resizable panel | Ethan Brown | included | screenshot |
Gradient Progress Bar |
included |
||
Command updating |
sample |
||
Cool bars/Cool menus |
sample |
||
Docking App Bar |
sample |
||
A real image list control |
Matt Wilson (of Attila fame!) |
pending |
|
Advanced layout managers, e.g. grid/table |
pending |
|
|
Command routing |
pending |
|
|
Dynamically docking/undocking windows |
pending |
|
|
href exe-safe serialization framework |
pending |
|
|
Managed HTML display ala a C# port of Mozilla? |
pending |
|
|
Menu/toolbar editing ala Office or VS.NET |
pending |
|
|
Outlook-style Bar |
pending |
|
|
SDI, MDI and Explorer-style application wizard |
pending |
|
|
Tab-based MDI implementation (ala VS.NET) |
pending |
|
|
Tear-off menus |
pending |
|
Note: Anything marked with "sample" means that there's a sample included with Genghis that shows the current implementation of a feature but that it's not done enough to be part of the official Genghis component. Mostly the hold-up is integration with the WinForms Designer.
Documentation
The Genghis documentation is composed of the C# documentation comments as part of the automated build. Check redist\Genghis.chm for the latest.
SimplePad
SimplePad is an MFC application that should serve as a simple baseline for what Genghis should enable to be built easily. We currently need a raw WinForms implementation to help guide the Genghis development efforts. After building it, use Help->Help Topics to see the list of features that the MFC SimplePad application provides straight out of the wizard (also duplicated here):
- MDI application
- Multiple documents
- Multiple views per document that are updated as the document changes
- "Dirty" bit handling
- Title bar that shows the document with the current focus along with a dirty indicator, i.e. the asterix.
- File New, Open, Save, Save As, Exit and MRU
- MDI Window menu
- Separate icons for the application and the documents
- Association of the icons with the documents in the shell
- Dockable, floating toolbar
- Print, Print Preview, Print Setup
- Edit Undo, Cut, Copy and Paste.
- View Toolbar and Status bar
- Help Topics and About
- Context-sensitive help
- Status bar that updates when menu items or toolbar items are in "focus", as well as showing NUM, SCROLL and CAPS as these keys change. Since Microsoft has shown that no one looks at the status bar much, the auto-update as items come into focus is not a feature that needs to be duplicated in WinForms/Genghis.
- Command line launching of the application based on the application's file extension
- Drag-n-drop from the file explorer
- Double-click support from the file explorer (including routing open requests to a currently open application)
The current .NET implementation of SimplePad is now available as one of the Genghis samples. Thanks to Paul Bartrum and Chris Burrows for all their hard work on this!
History
-
03/09/04: Release v0.5:
- New HtmlLinkLabel class from Jeff Key that knows how to launch IE and EXEs directly w/o requiring you to handle the event
- Much prettier images in SimplePad from Chris Burrows
- Updated MRU code from Michael Weinhardt to match .NET event signature conventions and to fix a problem when using more than one MRU components on a single menu
- Updated FileSearchEngine code from Mike Marshall to check for whole words at beginning and end of line correctly
- Updated validation code from Michael Weinhardt with support for validating controls at a container level, e.g. validating controls on a tab instead of on an entire form
- New gradient progress bar from Mike Marshall
- Updated FileDocument from Chris Sells to match text of Windows Forms Programming to include more MFC-like features like a pluggable scheme for serialization handling, registration of document extension with the shell, and adding to recent docs, i.e. Start->Documents
- Updated HandleCollector from Ethan Brown to work with .NET 1.0 and .NET 1.1
- Performance enhancements from Ethan Brown in the MappedDrives and SystemShares classes
- New user-resizable panel from Ethan Brown
- Updated WebCommandLineHelper from Andrew Duncan to fix System.IO.FileLoadException in ieexec.exe
- Updated AniForm from Mike Marshall to support stacking ala SharpReader and fix a terminal server-related bug
- Updated cool menu sample from Chris Burrows with additional support for abstracting commands from click even handlers
-
4/25/03: Release v0.4:
- Everything tested under VS.NET 2002 & 2003 (except HandleCollector, which doesn't work under VS.NET 2003)
- Mike Marshall's AniForm -an MSN Messanger-style popup window
- Chris Burrows' Image Index Editor - a UI Type Editor for use with ImageList index selection
- Dean Cleaver's .NET AppBar implementation (a C# port of original code from Jeffrey Richter)
- Mike Marshall's File Search Engine: a text file search implementation with behavior similar to dev studio's "Find In Files"
- Matthew W. Adams' et. al. Themed controls
- Chris Sells's InitialInstanceActivator. The InitialInstanceActivator makes sure that only one instance of an application is started and when another instance is started, the first instance is passed the command line arguments passed to the initial instance
- Chris Sells's MultiSdiApplicationContext class for allowing multiple top-level Windows Forms
- Peter Stephens' changes to the CommandlineParser that fix some bugs as well as add the ability to skip the first argument
- Matt Berther's additions to the CompletionComboBox to fire an event when the text typed does not match any items in the dropdown
- Peter Foreman's splash screen implementation
- Chris Sells's newly improved WebCommandLineHelper class which now works with .NET 1.0 and 1.1, includes URL decoding and requires no additional permissions (although it does require a server-side HTTP handler, included as the ConfigFileHandler class that maps requests for foo.exe?bar=quux.config to the foo.exe.config file).
- Shawn Wildermuth's WizardSheet updates
- Chris Sells's Status Bar Extender for mapping status messages to Windows Forms controls
- Andre Van Der Merwe's CommandLineParser
changes as described below:
- Added ValueDelimiters: enum for ValueUsageAttribute which lets the user specify which (combination) of delimiters (space, : or =) will be allowed
- Added AllowOnOff: bool in FlagUsageAttribute to specify if a +/- suffixes can be used on the flag
- Added EnvironmentDefaults: string in ParserUsageAttribute, allows the user to specify defaults in an environment variable (ala DIRCMD).
- Modified
the Long&Short help generation functions to
- Format/pad flag/param names correctly regardless of length
- Show [+|-] prefix (if applicable) for flags
- Show [sp|:|=] delimiters (as applicable) for values
-
08/18/02: Release v0.3:
- Screen shots for everything.
- CVS repository available, as provided by our rmTrack sponsor, along with extensive CVS docs from Brad Wilson.
- MRU support from Michael Weinhardt, including both in-menu and sub-menu support.
- A much more robust set of validation components from Michael Weinhardt (Michael's been busy : ) modeled along the lines of the ASP.NET validation components, including required, regex, range and comparison validators.
- FileDocument component from Chris Sells for document/dirty bit handling.
- Wizard support from Shawn Wildermuth, including changing page groups on the fly!
- Custom state treeview from Chris Sells so that you can set and show all three checkbox states.
- A class to expose the WinForms HandleCollector from Ethan Brown so that you can put your own custom resources into it.
- A Screen Saver class from Shawn Van Ness.
- A bunch of file utility classes from Ethan Brown, including retrieving mapped drives, retrieving shares and path resolution b/w UNC, local (including SUBST, etc).
- A cursor changer class that works with the using block by Shawn Wildermuth.
- A WebCommandLineHelper class from Chris Sells to parse command line arguments from the URL used to launch href-exes.
- Update to the FileNameDialog from Deepak Shenoy to include newish flags.
-
6/10/02: Release v0.2:
- Updated ListViewSorter to be declarative. Look for Designer support ASAP.
- Generated new genghis.key and removed it from the distribution.
- Brad Wilson, our new Build Master, contributed a Nant build.
- Paul Bartrum and Chris Burrows contributed a mostly-complete .NET implementation of SimplePad, along with some sample command updating and cool menus implementations.
- Paul Bartrum also provided a window serializer and a preference class.
- Michael Weinhardt contributed an MRU sample.
- I contributed a custom state treeview useful for things like tri-state checkboxes.
- Minor bug fixes.
- 4/3/02: Released v0.1.
- 2/28/02: Set the license.
- 2/16/02: Posted this page.
Sponsors
rmTrack provided the initial hosting space and administration support for Genghis bug tracking and source code control.
License
Copyright © 2002-2004 The Genghis Group
Th is software is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied warranty. In no event will the authors be held liable for any damages arising from the use of this software.
Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any purpose, including commercial applications, subject to the following restrictions:
-
The origin of this software must not be misrepresented; you must not claim that
you wrote the original software. If you use this software in a product, an
acknowledgment in the product documentation is required, as shown here:
Portions copyright © 2002-2004 The Genghis Group (http://www.genghisgroup.com/).
- No substantial portion of the source code of this library may be redistributed without the express written permission of the copyright holders, where "substantial" is defined as enough code to be recognizably from this library.
License Note
This license based on the open source zlib/libpng license. The idea was to keep the license as simple as possible to encourage use of Genghis in free and commercial applications and libraries, but to keep the source code together and to give credit to the Genghis contributors for their efforts. While this license allows shipping Genghis in binary form, if shipping a Genghis variant is the sole purpose of your product, please contact The Genghis Group for a new license.
Sunday, Jan 6, 2002, 12:00 AM in Tools
VS.NET Fun Facts
If you haven't seen it yet, check out the VS.NET Fun Facts piece that started as praise and bitching about VS.NET, but turned into something pretty useful if you'd like to get the most out of VS.NET.
Thursday, Sep 13, 2001, 12:00 AM in Tools
CorPub
Oct 10, 2001
I've updated CorPub to show *all* managed AppDomains by initializing the COR debugging sub-system prior to enumerating them. Thanks to Atif Aziz for the tip.
September 13, 2001
I built the CorPub utility when my friend Jason pointed me at the .NET corpub.idl interfaces (his exact words were "ICorPublishProcess rocks!"). CorPub lists the managed processes on the current machine and the AppDomains in each process, as follows:
Managed process 0xa54: D:\project\mine\RegexPlorer\bin\Debug\RegexPlorer.exe AppDomain 0x1: RegexPlorer.exe Managed process 0xdc8: C:\vs.net\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe AppDomain 0x1: DefaultDomain Managed process 0x1ec: C:\PROGRA~1\MICROS~2.NET\FRAMEW~1\Bin\ildasm.exe AppDomain 0x1: DefaultDomain
It's fun for spelunking. Enjoy.
NOTE: .NET beta 2 is required to run this utility.
Wednesday, Aug 8, 2001, 12:00 AM in Tools
.NET XML Checker and Validator
Aug 8, 2001
xmlValid is simple command line utility that will check an xml file for well-formedness and, optionally, will validate it against a supplied XML schema file (xsd). I built it to check that my site's HTML files were well-formed (and therefore XHTML-compliance), but it's got all kinds of other uses, including checking .NET .config files. Source is included. Enjoy.
Usage: xmlValid.exe xmlFile [xsdFile]
Note that this utility requires .NET beta 2 to be installed.
Tuesday, Aug 7, 2001, 12:00 AM in Tools
Setting the Completion Character
Aug 7, 2001
Whenever I set up a new machine (which happens a lot as WinXP and .NET go through their beta & RC cycles), I always need to manually set up the completion character (to TAB, of course) in the Registry. Shawn VanNess posted a .rgs file that would set this up without the lengthy search through the Registry. Inspired by Shawn, here's my own completionChar.reg that doesn't require a program to parse .rgs files (which doesn't come with Windows).
BTW, if you don't know about the command shell's Completion Character, stop right now, run the completionChar.reg file, start up a WinNT/Win2K/WinXP command shell, type "cd c:\p[TAB]" and watch while the shell expands it to "cd C:\Program Files\" for you. If you have other directories that start with "c:\p", continue to hit [TAB] to cycle through them. This works for any directory or file name and it boosts my productivity by about 100% on the command line. I can't live without it!
Monday, Aug 6, 2001, 12:00 AM in Tools
NullScript Used to Reverse Engineer Gen<X>
Wow. I'm impressed as all get out. Hugh Brown has reverse-engineered Gen<X> as one of the tests of his NullScript implementation. I wish I would have had this when I started Gen<X> a couple of years ago. It would've saved me figuring out how ASP did it.
My thinking along these lines years ago led me to go the opposite way, i.e. I built a front-end ASP parser that generated script for VBS. I called it TextBox (which, as a Win32 programmer, I should've realized was a terrible name...).
Sunday, Aug 5, 2001, 12:00 AM in Tools
Moniker Wizard
Here's my moniker wizard that includes the framework used by the Basic Monikers.
Saturday, Aug 4, 2001, 12:00 AM in Tools
Tim's COM+ Utilities
Aug 4, 2001
The great and powerful Tim Ewald (author of Transactional COM+: Building Scalable Applications and personal friend of mine) put together a handy little set of COM+ classes and utility functions in a concise header file that he has graciously allowed me to host. Among my favorites are IsInActivity, IsInTransaction, IsSecurityEnabled, GetCallersName, IsCallerInRole, and parameterized versions of CoGetObjectContext and GetAspObject (which is even cooler than my CAspPtr). Download the code! Buy the book! Feed your brain!
Friday, Aug 3, 2001, 12:00 AM in Tools
Command Line Parsing
Aug 3, 2001
I got tired of not having getopt under Win32 and the best version to port doesn't handle slashes (as per the Windows standard) or @files for arguments and it requires you to give away the source for every app that uses it, so, inspired by my friend Josh Gray, I built my own. It supports typed flags and params, @file support and building full usages on the fly.
Plus, the latest version has support for parsing ANSI or Unicode argfiles, as provided by Johan Nilsson. Thanks, Johan! Also, I've added a contribution by Paul Westcott to support arguments with restricted values. Thanks, Paul! And, as if that weren't enough, Adis Delalic contributed a UML diagram to describe how the CLP is built. Wow.
And as if that weren't enough, Keith Brown ported the command line parser to VS.NET. Thanks, Keith!
Thursday, Aug 2, 2001, 12:00 AM in Tools
Expando Objects
Aug 2, 2001
I've seen lots of interest lately in expando objects, e.g. objects that can add methods and properties on the fly. Joe Graf wrote a piece on IDispatchEx in MIND that was pretty interesting. My own implementation of IDispatchEx is available here. It supports expando objects that have no static properties or methods as well as those that do. Check out the DispExTest.js for a demonstration, dispeximpl.h, dynamemlist.h and dynamemlist.cpp for the implementation and MyExpando.h for the usage.
Wednesday, Aug 1, 2001, 12:00 AM in Tools
Windows Template Library
Aug 1, 2001
-
WTL is, spiritually at least, what the MFC team would've come up with had they started with the C++ language as it is today. It's an extension to ATL and available as a download from Microsoft.
-
If you have trouble downloading WTL, see Petr Prikryl's "Easy Installation of WTL" post on the Code Project site.
-
WTL is pretty much completely undocumented, but you can read about it in a 2-part series by Chris Sells, Dharma Shukla and Nenad Stefanovic (chief engineer on WTL at Microsoft):
-
You can also read about WTL on iDevResource: WTL Architecture by Dr. Richard Grimes.
-
WTL is officially unsupported, but the ATL mailing list has lots of coverage of WTL.
-
The CodeProject is gathering a set of WTL resources at www.codeproject.com/wtl.
-
Yahoo has a WTL newsgroup.
Tuesday, Jul 31, 2001, 12:00 AM in Tools
VARIANT_BOOL Wrapper
July 31, 2001
CComBool is a class to prevent the misuse of the VARIANT_BOOL type. VARIANT_BOOL is a problem because its legal values are -1 and 0 instead of 1 and 0, making converting back and forth between bool, BOOL and VARIANT_BOOL problematic. CComBool supports the constructors and operators needed to convert between the three C++ Windows Boolean types. It also supports operator& and CopyTo for common COM client and server usage. CComBool is available here.
Monday, Jul 30, 2001, 12:00 AM in Tools
ATL CRT Numbers
July 30, 2001
The following table lists the various prices you pay for using the CRT and the default Win98 support in VC6. The builds were done with VC6, SP3, ATL COM in-proc server, no classes, no MFC, no merged p/s:
| Target | CRT | Win98 | Size |
| RelMinSize | _ATL_MIN_CRT | yes | 24KB |
| RelMinDepend | _ATL_MIN_CRT | yes | 24KB |
| RelMinSize | _ATL_MIN_CRT | /opt:nowin98* | 7KB |
| RelMinDepend | _ATL_MIN_CRT | /opt:nowin98 | 10KB |
| RelMinSize | MSVCRT | /opt:nowin98 | 20KB |
| RelMinDepend | MSVCRT | /opt:nowin98 | 22KB |
*Note: /opt:nowin98 is a VC6 linker switch that says not to align binaries on a Win98-friendly boundary. /opt:nowin98 builds will still load and run under Win98 without a problem, but the loading time could be longer. Also, when images get above 24KB, the /opt:nowin98 seems not to much of an affect on the size of the image.
Sunday, Jul 29, 2001, 12:00 AM in Tools
VBLite
July 29, 2001
Dharma Shukla and I wrote "Extending ATL3.0 Containment to Help You Write Real-World Containers" in the 12/99 issue of MSJ detailing how to add much-needed features to ATL's support for control containment. Dharma wrote the sample code that accompanies the piece and has already made improvements to the code based on feedback. He's maintaining the history and bits here.
Saturday, Jul 28, 2001, 12:00 AM in Tools
Attila
Attila stands for "ATL for Applications." Attila is a set of extensions built on top of ATL to provide application-level services in the same flavor as MFC. Towards that end, Attila uses a lot of the same notions as ATL, e.g. heavy use of templates, static binding and reliance on the compiler and the linker doing their job. Also, in the flavor of ATL, Attila is under-documented and requires a lot of user investment to make use of it. However, once you do, we think you'll find the flexibility and efficiency worth it. If you don't, you haven't lost much, 'cuz Attila is free. Enjoy.