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Fast Track Visual C++ 6.0 Programming
(Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)
Author(s): Steve Holzner
ISBN: 0471312908
Publication Date: 09/01/98

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Note that most of the information is in a block named “040904b0,” which indicates that the information is in U.S. English. For international programmers, here are all the options:

        0×0401  Arabic
        0×0402  Bulgarian
        0×0403  Catalan
        0×0404  Traditional Chinese
        0×0405  Czech
        0×0406  Danish
        0×0407  German
        0×0408  Greek
        0×0409  U.S. English
        0×040A  Castilian Spanish
        0×040B  Finnish
        0×040C  French
        0×040D  Hebrew
        0×040E  Hungarian
        0×040F  Icelandic
        0×0410  Italian
        0×0411  Japanese
        0×0412  Korean
        0×0413  Dutch
        0×0414  Norwegian - Bokml
        0×0810  Swiss Italian
        0×0813  Belgian Dutch
        0×0814  Norwegian - Nynorsk
        0×0415  Polish
        0×0416  Brazilian Portuguese
        0×0417  Rhaeto-Romanic
        0×0418  Romanian
        0×0419  Russian
        0×041A  Croato-Serbian (Latin)
        0×041B  Slovak
        0×041C  Albanian
        0×041D  Swedish
        0×041E  Thai
        0×041F  Turkish
        0×0420  Urdu
        0×0421  Bahasa
        0×0804  Simplified Chinese
        0×0807  Swiss German
        0×0809  U.K. English
        0×080A  Mexican Spanish
        0×080C  Belgian French
        0×0C0C  Canadian French
        0×100C  Swiss French
        0×0816  Portuguese
        0×081A  Serbo-Croatian (Cyrillic)

The information in this resource is what we read when the user opens the About dialog box. Let’s design that dialog box now.


Figure 14.4  Designing our About box.

Designing the About Box

Our project’s Help menu has an “About About” item in it; this somewhat awkwardly named item opens the About box that describes the application. Open the About dialog box now for editing, as shown in Figure 14.4.

We place the information we fetch from the Version resource in a new label control. Create that now, add it to the About box, and give it the ID IDC_STATIC1. In addition, use ClassWizard to add a CString member variable to the text in IDC_STATIC1 named m_text. This is the member variable that holds the version information we want to display.

That’s all we do here. When the user selects the About About item in the Help menu, the following code is currently executed in the application object:

void CAboutApp::OnAppAbout()
{
    CAboutDlg aboutDlg;
    aboutDlg.DoModal();
}

This is there we read our Version information, and we’re now ready to write some code.

Getting Version Information

Programs read the Version resource with GetFileVersionInfo(), which fills a buffer with version data. It’s up to us to create that buffer, so first we call GetFileVersionInfoSize(), passing it the name of our program and a pointer to a value that is always set to 0. (Note that we must use double backwards slashes in text string parameters so they are not interpreted as escape characters.)

void CAboutApp::OnAppAbout()
{
    CAboutDlg aboutDlg;

    DWORD Zero, Size;                                       ⇐

    Size = GetFileVersionInfoSize(“c:\\avc\\About\\debug\\About.exe”, &Zero); 
                                                                   ⇐
    .
    .
    .

Now we set aside a data buffer and call GetFileVersionInfo() to fill that buffer with data. Here’s how you use GetFileVersionInfo() in general:

    BOOL GetFileVersionInfo(
        LPTSTR  lptstrFilename,   // pointer to filename string
        DWORD  dwHandle,    // ignored
        DWORD  dwLen, // size of buffer
        LPVOID  lpData  // pointer to buffer to get file-version info.
    )

and here’s how we use it in our code:

void CAboutApp::OnAppAbout()
{
    CAboutDlg aboutDlg;

    DWORD Zero, Size;

    Size = GetFileVersionInfoSize(“c:\\avc\\About\\debug\\About.exe”, &Zero);

    LPVOID VersionData = new char[Size];          ⇐
    GetFileVersionInfo(“c:\\avc\\About\\debug\\About.exe”, Zero, Size,
VersionData);                                               ⇐
    .
    .
    .

Now we’ve read in the version data, and we’re ready to start reading data from the VersionData buffer. We begin with the ProductName entry.

Getting Version Resource Values

You use VerQueryValue() to retrieve individual values from the Version resource data.

    BOOL VerQueryValue(
        const LPVOID  pBlock,     // buffer for version resource
        LPTSTR  lpSubBlock,        // value to retrieve
        LPVOID * lplpBuffer, // buffer for version pointer
        PUINT  puLen     // version-value length buffer
    )

Here are the formats of the lpSubBlock parameter:

   \            VerQueryValue() retrieves a pointer to a VS_FIXEDFILEINFO
                structure for the version resource

   \VarFileInfo\Translation   Gets the translation table, an array
                              of language and character-set identifiers.

   \StringFileInfo\lang-charset\string-name   Gets a value from the
                                              version resource

For example, we get the ProductName entry from the Version resource and place the product name, which is “About Application” for us, in a new CString object named FormattedString. This is the string we display in the About box.

void CAboutApp::OnAppAbout()
{
    CAboutDlg aboutDlg;

    DWORD Zero, Size;
    char Text[40];

    Size = GetFileVersionInfoSize(“c:\\avc\\About\\debug\\About.exe”, &Zero);

    LPVOID VersionData = new char[Size];
    GetFileVersionInfo(“c:\\avc\\About\\debug\\About.exe”, Zero, Size,
VersionData);

    LPVOID TextData;                            ⇐
    UINT TextSize = 0;                         ⇐

    VerQueryValue(VersionData, “\\StringFileInfo\\040904b0\\ProductName”, &TextData, &TextSize);  ⇐

    CString FormattedString = (char *) TextData; ⇐
        .
        .
        .

This stores the name of the program in the CString object FormattedString, ready to display. We’ve retrieved the product name for our application; we get the major and minor version numbers next.

Getting the Major and Minor Version Numbers

We get the major and minor versions of the program (for example, if this is About 1.2, the major version is 1, the minor version is 2) by filling a VS_FIXEDFILEINFO structure.

        typedef struct _VS_FIXEDFILEINFO {
            DWORD dwSignature;
            DWORD dwStrucVersion;
            DWORD dwFileVersionMS;
            DWORD dwFileVersionLS;
            DWORD dwProductVersionMS;
            DWORD dwProductVersionLS;
            DWORD dwFileFlagsMask;
            DWORD dwFileFlags;
            DWORD dwFileOS;
            DWORD dwFileType;
            DWORD dwFileSubtype;
            DWORD dwFileDateMS;
            DWORD dwFileDateLS;
        } VS_FIXEDFILEINFO;


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