WTL 8.1 is coming!

After almost two years of silence there appears to be activity around WTL again. Of course this makes sense since Windows 7 is almost done. I just noticed build 8.1.9127 posted over on SourceForge.NET.

For starters it now builds cleanly by internally suppressing warnings against the use of unsafe CRT functions. I have got into the habit of including WTL 8.0 in my precompiled header as follows:

#pragma warning(push)
#pragma warning(disable:4996) // WTL still uses some unsafe CRT functions
#include <atlapp.h>
.
.
.
#pragma warning(pop)

Well no more. To be precise, it still uses those unsafe functions but the warnings are now suppressed internally and explicitly around those functions so that we don’t have to deal with it ourselves.

Wrappers have also been added for the Desktop Window Manager API as well as the support needed to subclass and double-buffer the painting of controls on glass. For more information on the DWM API as well as the issues with controls on glass you can read my articles here and here.

Beyond that it looks like this is just the initial placeholder for what will become the 8.1 release of WTL.