Although GDI+ has been around for some time, some developers have issues with the performance of this API when updating or re-painting the screen. Some of the issues experienced stem from the fact that GDI+ is not hardware accelerated. This article details two ways to improve the apparent performance of applications using GDI+; use of both a cached bitmap and double buffering are highlighted.

Restrictions imposed by Windows Vista's User Account Control are preventing dll registration information from being recorded in the system registry. Registry free COM, as described in this article, reduces an application's reliance on the registry and eliminates the aforementioned registration issues.

XML is increasingly being used by application developers as a structured means of recording both user and application data. There are a number of software tools available on the web which can be used to read and write XML files. This article presents the basic steps required to configure and use one such tool - Microsoft's XML Parser.

A step by step guide to the creation of a simple event sink object is described in this article. The new class, which is derived from the IDispEventImpl ATL class, can be used in conjunction with the ATL Timer, described in an earlier article. Examples of both a sink map and an event handler function are given.

This article presents a means whereby large text files can be read, on a character by character basis, without resorting to the use of file I/O functions. This reader class employs several Windows API functions to map a file to virtual memory, allowing it to be treated as if it were a large array.

A simple interval timer, which can return the elapsed time in microseconds, is described in this article. This timer class has functions to start and stop the timer and functions for retrieving the elapsed time in seconds, milliseconds and, as already mentioned, in microseconds. The timer corrects for the start and stop function call overhead.

This short article describes a collection of classes which can be employed to convert characters from any of the Unicode Standard character encoding schemes. Each class converts encoded characters to 'unsigned long' values, allowing host applications to handle any international character set.

The operation of a simple timer, written using ATL, is described. This timer supports two modes of operation - one shot and continuous. Also, the timer can 'fire' events, notifying the calling process that the timer has expired.

Describes a simple class which extracts the active monitor's VESA E-EDID information from the Windows registry. The class, which has been tested under Windows XP, can easily be extended to return any desired EDID entry.