Some questions - Win32s, Borland and OWL 2
Martin Piazzola
it was a Borland problem, and it turned out to be a limitation of
win32s, that programs cannot share instances of a DLL under win32s. I
may be wrong, but some testing indicates that this is only a problem
when 2 32 bit programs try to access the same DLL, it didn't give me the
nasty white error box when my win32s program tried to access a DLL in use
by an existing 16 bit app (namely, BCW.EXE). A couple things still
puzzle me about this. A) Is this a problem that Mickeysoft plans on
fixing, or is it just a "tough titty my little pretty" situation? and
B) How do win32s programs manage to access the Windows kernal DLL's without
this error occurring? Or is the problem only with 32 bit DLL's?
Anyway, until I can resolve these pains, I will stay away from win32s for
a while. Nice try.
Ok, now some questions that are Borland specific, that some may be
interested in, and others may ridicule me for. Ah well, here goes.
1) I am using classes exported from a DLL, in my program. Now, I want to
have resources such as menus, bitmaps, etc. in this DLL. Now, the
resource functions all want a Module parameter. So, should I construct
my DLL's as TModule's, and use this Tmodule as the parameter all the time?
Thus so, should my classes all have a member which details what module
they are from? This gets a bit confusing.
2) My app has a TControlBar, in its TMDIDecoratedFrame. This seemed very
simple, when I used AppExpert to generate the framework for my app. One
thing that confuses me, is that the constructor for these TButtonGadgets
that are being inserted is not given a third parameter, which would
indicate to me (from reading the docs) that they would be disabled on
creation. But, nope, they are enabled when they show up on the screen.
I can't figure out how they are getting that way. I also cannot figure
out how to disable them once they are onscreen. I figured out how to
remove them and insert them, and decided that I could just do that, but
I would really like to grey them. Looking at the STEPSxx tutorial,
I can see this happening, in step11 and step12, but can't find in the
code where it is doing it! In Borland Docs for TGadget, I find an
enabling function but no disabler function.
3) I assign a menu, designed as a resource, with AssignMenu, to my
TMDIDecoratedFrame, and want to know how to "grey" and "enable" menu items
on that menu. Do I have to create a new menu and assign it, or can
I just call functions to change the entries? Looking at the docs I see a
lot about merging menus, and building them, do I have to do something like
that? I want to stay as close to the OWL system as possible.
4) Is there any way that multiple progrqammers can "share" a project file
in Borland over a network? I havent been able to do it, and can't find
anything in the docs.
5) When I tried to compile a 16 bit app, using BWCC.dll, and having
Diagnostic checked in the Target, I get a linker error, unable to open
file BIDSDI.LIB. I cant find this file anywhere on my hard drive!
Disabling the diagnostic allows me to compile. I find all kinds of BIDS
libraries, but none that are BIDSDI.LIB. Compiling 32 bit, has no
problems. Any clues?
I would appreciate any help you can give.