TechEd 99 - Internet Development with C++

Internet Development with Visual C++ 6.0 (Lon Fisher)

July 9 - This session was actually held by Lon Fisher instead of the scheduled speaker, Greg DeMichielle. Despite the change, it was a successful session where the speaker demonstrated, with practical examples, how to take advantage of the MFC classes that encapsulate the WinInet API. Lon explained the basics of HTTP, the simplest commands and the headers, and then showed how to open and download a remote file using WinInet in a console application written from scratch.
    The presentation moved on to cover the CHtmlView class. This is an MFC class aimed at allowing you to embed a WebBrowser control as the view window of your MFC-based document/view application.
    Lon also hinted at the possibility of exposing some new methods outside the MFC class in order to provide the MFC host application with an object model that extends the one created by the WebBrowser when hosting a HTML page. Such a feature has been around for a while, and can be implemented manually either in MFC or ATL code.
    But take note: you have to do all the work yourself! So I posed a couple of questions to Lon:

Dino: Are you enhancing the way people will program in MFC against the Web?

Lon: Sure, we're doing it but in general we have to be very very careful when it comes to adding features or changing, even slightly, existing ones. The risk of breaking something is real.

Dino: So what about a new extended WebBrowser or a brand new CHtmlView class?

Lon: We're considering such things, but some of us don’t agree about extending the functionality of both elements. I can't say who will win this game but you can always wait for the new Visual C++ 7.0 to ship! In general, though, it’s possible that too much functionality will make the component weaker.

Dino Esposito

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