Releasing the S7-Project-Explorer as open-source

After the ENLYZE PortSniffer in 2020, I’m glad to announce that another tool I developed at ENLYZE has just been released as open-source. The ENLYZE S7-Project-Explorer is a Windows application to explore Siemens STEP 7 projects and export a complete PLC variable list as a CSV table. This solves our recurring …

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That time I had to patch the Universal CRT

I just finished a blog post where I replaced almost the entire Microsoft build toolchain for our Windows software with open-source alternatives better suiting our needs. Except for the Visual Studio C runtime library, nowadays called Universal CRT (shortened to UCRT or just CRT). The CRT had been performing without any …

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Modern Visual Studio meets ancient Windows

In my previous blog series, I have shown how to write Win32 applications in 2020 using the amenities that modern C++ brings. Writing an application in 2020 doesn’t mean that we have to forget about 2000 though: The unrivaled compatibility of the Win32 API makes it possible to run your modern application even on …

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Writing Win32 apps like it's 2020: A DPI-aware resizable wizard

User interfaces in 2020 need to consider many more details than those of previous generations. One of the biggest changes of the last decade is certainly the introduction of HiDPI displays, displays with much higher resolutions together with software using more pixels per GUI element. Win32 with its pixel-based …

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ReactOS Build Environment 2.2 released

The ReactOS Build Environment (RosBE), our curated set of compilers and build tools, has just received a major upgrade. After more than 7 years of using the same and now ancient GCC 4.7.2, ReactOS is finally going to be built with the help of a modern compiler (GCC 8.4.0). Among other things, the new version better …

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