Spin news

I've recently needed to add a small new feature to wxSpinCtrl: possibility to display and enter the numbers in hexadecimal format. This is done now with the addition of SetBase() method, so now you can either call SetBase(16) explicitly in the code or use "base" XRC property by adding <base>16</base> to your XRC files (this needs to be done manually as dialog editors don't have support for it yet). Just in case you're curious, here is how the new control looks in the updated widgets sample under OS X:

But as a side effect of working on this, I've also fixed a few other bugs in wxSpinCtrl, hence this progress report:

• First, I've simply removed wxOSX version of this control. Strangely enough, we had a generic implementation of it for wxOSX which was different from another generic implementation used for all other platforms. They were not identical but pretty similar and at least now we only have one version to maintain.
• Next I fixed the funny bug with contents of the control being shown as password field if wxALIGN_CENTRE was used. Even though it's more correct to use wxTE_CENtRE, it's more user-friendly to support both versions, especially as the documentation was rather confusing on this subject until recently.
• I also added the generation of wxEVT_COMMAND_TEXT_ENTER to the generic wxSpinCtrl which didn't send them at all before. This fixed another bug as generic wxSpinCtrl was also used for wxSpinCtrlDouble under wxMSW, and so this event wasn't sent when using real-valued spin controls under Windows, even though it was sent with integer-valued ones.
• But integer-valued Windows wxSpinCtrl was not without problems neither: the value carried by its events wrapped over when it was greater than SHRT_MAX, i.e. 32767. So I fixed this as well.

There are still some bugs left in wxSpinCtrl, e.g. settings colours doesn't work correctly in the generic version but it's in a much better shape now than only a few days ago.

Did you know that Intel VTune used wxWidgets?

Well, I didn't know this but reading the release notes for a new update I've just downloaded I noticed the following at the end of the document:

wxWindows Library
This tool includes wxWindows software which can be downloaded from
http://www.wxwidgets.org/downloads.
wxWindows Library Licence, Version 3.1
======================================
Copyright (C) 1998-2005 Julian Smart, Robert Roebling et al
...

And, indeed, Ctrl-Alt-middle-clicking on VTune window gives:

Sometimes I forget that only a very small proportion of all wxWidgets users reads mailing lists (let alone posts to them), the forums and so on and that there are plenty of companies that use wxWidgets that we have no idea about at all. So it's not really surprising to find that Intel uses wx but it's still nice to have them in our users list!

How to use 2.9.4 wxMSW binaries

We have decided to experiment with providing binaries for wxWidgets releases. So, for the first time ever, 2.9.4 release includes binaries for a few different versions of Microsoft Visual C++ compiler.
However we might not have done a very good job of explaining how to actually use them, the README at the link above is relatively brief and omits some steps, so let me try to explain in more details how to build your wxWidgets applications using the files provided and without building wxWidgets yourself.
First, you need to get the correct files. You will always need the headers one but the rest depends on your compiler version and architecture: as different versions of MSVC compiler are not binary compatible, you should select the files with the correct vc80, vc90 or vc100 suffix depending on whether you use Visual Studio 2005, 2008 or 2010 respectively. You also need to decide whether you use the x64 files for 64-bit development or the ones without this suffix for the still more common 32-bit builds. After determining the combination of suffixes you need, you should download the "Dev" and the "ReleaseDLL" files in addition to the "Headers" one above, e.g. for 32-bit MSVS 2010 development you need wxMSW-2.9.4_vc100_Dev.7z and wxMSW-2.9.4_vc100_ReleaseDLL.7z.

Once you have the files you need, unzip all of them into the same directory, for example c:\wx\2.9.4. You should have only include and lib subdirectories under it, nothing else. To avoid hard-coding this path into your projects, define wxwin environment variable containing it: although it's a little known fact, all versions of MSVC support environment variable expansion in the C++ projects (but not, unfortunately, in the solution files).
Next step is to set up your project to use these files. You need to do the following:

• In the compiler options, i.e. "C/C++" properties:
  • Add $(wxwin)/include/msvc;$(wxwin)/include to the "Additional Include Directories". Notice that the order is important here, putting the MSVC-specific directory first ensures that you use wx/setup.h automatically linking in wxWidgets libraries.
  • Add WXUSINGDLL and wxMSVC_VERSION_AUTO to the list of defined symbols in "Preprocessor Definitions". The first should be self-explanatory (we only provide DLLs, not static libraries) while the second one is necessary to use the libraries from e.g. lib\vc100_dll directory and not the default lib\vc_dll.
  • Also check that _UNICODE and UNICODE symbols are defined in the same "Preprocessor Definitions" section. This should already be the case for the newly created projects but it might be necessary to add them if you're upgrading an existing one.
    [added at 2013-02-08 in response to comments]
  • Check that you use "Multi-threaded [Debug] DLL" in the "Run-time library" option under "Code Generation" to ensure that your build uses the same CRT version as our binaries.
• In the linker options you only need to add $(wxwin)\lib\vc100_dll (with the compiler-version-dependent suffix, of course) to "Additional Library Directories" under "Linker\General" in the options. Thanks to the use of MSVC-specific setup.h you don't need to list wxWidgets libraries manually, i.e. you do not need to put anything in the list of "Additional Dependencies".

Now you should be able to build your project successfully, both in "Debug" and "Release" configurations. With MSVC 10 it can also be done from the command line using msbuild.exe. Of course, to run the generated executable you will need to either add the directory containing wxWidgets DLLs to your PATH or copy the DLL files to a directory already on it. Finally, if you want to distribute the binaries created using these options, you will need to install Microsoft Visual C++ run-time DLLs. Again, MSVC 10 has an advantage here as you can simply copy msvcp100.dll and msvcr100.dll as any other DLL, while you need to install specially for the previous compiler versions that use WinSxS ("side-by-side") for them.
Let us know if you run into any problems using these binaries or, on the contrary, if you didn't but were glad to have them. If enough people find them useful, we'll try to provide them again for 2.9.5 and, most importantly, for 3.0.

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Updated on 2012-08-23T12:55:10: Corrected linker options instructions.