Visual C++ Code Samples And Utilities

Source Code Samples

Changing the screen brightness programmingly - By using the Gamma Ramp API Some video cards allows you to programmingly modify the Gamma Ramp values. You can use this feature to change the brightness of the entire screen.

Preventing application crash by using exception handling mechanism When a program does something wrong, for example, reading from invalid memory address, the operating system displays a "crash" window with information about the problem that caused the exception, and terminates the application. This sample project demonstrates how to avoid this kind of crashes, display your own exception information window, and allow the user to continue running the application after the exception occurred.

Moving items up and down in a ListView control. In some occasions, you might want to allow the user the change the order of items in the ListView, by moving the selected items up and down. In the API of ListView control, there is no support for swapping between 2 items. The only way to do that, is by manually swapping all data of the items, including the lParam value and all columns !

Displaying 'Browse Folders' dialog with the default folder selected. The 'Browse For Folder' dialog allows the user to select a folder from all available local drives and network resources. This code snippet demonstrate how to display this dialog-box.

Displaying the 'Properties' of a file or folder. When you select a file or folder in Explorer window, and choose 'Properties' from the menu, you get the properties window that contains some essential information about the file: The size of file, created date, modified date, attributes, and so on. It's possible to display this properties window programmatically, by using the ShellExecuteEx API function.

Enumerating Windows credentials with CredEnumerate function This code sample enumerates all credentials of the current logged on user, and dump them into the standard output.

Utilities With Full Source Code

ExeInfo v1.01 The ExeInfo utility shows general information about executable files (*.exe), dynamic-link libraries (*.dll), ocx files, and drivers files.

AtNow v1.1 AtNow is a command-line utility that schedules programs and commands to run in the near future.

WinExplorer v1.30 WinExplorer is a utility that shows all system's windows in hierarchical display. For every window in the hierarchy, you can view its properties, like handle, class name, caption, size, position and more. You can also modify some properties, like Caption and Visible/Enable.

Visual Basic Code Snippets and Utilities

In the following section, you can find a variety of Visual Basic code samples. For every sample, you can download the entire project for opening in Visual Basic 6.0.

Revealing the passwords behind asterisks in Internet Explorer This small utility reveals the passwords stored behind the asterisks in the web pages of Internet Explorer 5.0 and above.

Creating a real console application in Visual Basic ! Although the Visual Basic compiler doesn't allow officially to create console applications, it's possible to do it with a simple trick. Read more >>

Revealing the passwords behind asterisks This code snippet scans all opened windows, and reveals the passwords behind the password text-boxes.

Access 95/97 Password Revealer This small utility reveals the database password of Microsoft Access files. It works only with version 95 and 97 of Microsoft Access.

System resources in Windows 95/98 This code snippet shows the percentages of free system resources in Windows 95 and Windows 98.

Fast string concatenation With this class, you can concatenate small strings into one big string in faster way than the standard "&" operator.

Using bidi32.dll for Logical-Visual conversion This code snippet is designated for using in bidirectional systems only (Hebrew and Arabic). It uses the functions in bidi32.dll to convert strings from Visual to Logical and from Logical to Visual.

Painting a Gradient between 2 colors on a form This code snippet shows how to paint a gradient on a form using Win32 API.

Drawing a rotated text on a form This code snippet demonstrate how to draw a rotated text on a form.

Creating a circle shaped window This code snippet demonstrates how to create a circle shaped window, by using a few Win32 API calls.

Web client tester With this small utility, you can send HTTP queries and see how the servers responds to those queries.

Faster items adding in ComboBox This code snippet shows you how to add combo items with Win32 API. It's much faster than using the AddItem method of VB.

Faster items adding in ComboBox (with item data) This code snippet shows you how to add combo items (both strings and items data) with Win32 API. It's much faster than using the AddItem method of VB.

Executing Control Panel applets This code snippet shows how to run standard Control Panel applets (Display Properties, Reginal Settings, Mouse Properties, and more) from Visual Basic code.

Converting network drive-based path to universal path name This code snippet shows how to use the WNetGetUniversalName for converting network drive-based path (Like I:\windows) to universal path name (Like \\MyComputer\c\windows)

Opening special Explorer windows This code snippet shows you how to open special Explorer windows, like My Computer, Control Panel, Printers, Fonts and more...

DoEvents alternative function This code snippet shows how to create an alternative function for the standard DoEvents function.

Registering and using a new window class This code snippet shows you how to register a new window class in Visual Basic and use that class to create new windows, and show them on a form.

Displaying and using a dialog box from external DLL file This code sample shows you how to display a dialog box from external DLL file. In this sample, the standard "Run" dialog of Microsoft Windows is shown on the screen.

Displaying the "Shut Down Windows" dialog This code snippet displays the "Shut Down Windows" by using undocumented API in shell32.dll

Getting the filename of an ActiveX class name