Rebuilding the CRT and MFC for Unicode on Win9x....

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2004/12/07 03:02 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2004/12/07/277204.aspx

In my office, there is a candy box. Don't worry, I am going somewhere with this....

I fill it with candy of all different sorts, and I usually have a very simple rule, one that keeps me from gaining weight -- I fill it with candy I do not like. Most other people can find stuff that they like, so the box gets emptied pretty regularly. Every once in a while, someone complains when the box is running low or does not have anything they like, and I point out that they are free to buy candy to help fill the box any time they want.

The point? This is a posting that will not appeal to everyone. But that's fine, I figure that anytime someone does not like what is being posted, I look to see how many topics they have requested. And then usually I do not feel so bad about not having appealed to them on some random day. Clearly they would not be coming back regularly if they did not like it every once in a while, right? :-)

Rebuilding the MFC and the CRT to support Unicode via MSLU is important since not everyone who wants to use MSLU can use the static versions of MFC and the CRT. Since Microsoft officially supports rebuiilding the CRT and MFC, and further since Microsoft supports MSLU, it is beyond me why juxtaposing the two supported concepts leads to something unsupported, But there you have it. Sometimes, 2 + 2 does not equal 4, apparently. Luckily, it is only for exceptionally large values of 2 so we may be okay....

Anyway, back in March of 2002, I was sent mail by a guy who later became the first Microsoft MVP for international "stuff". As an aside, it took me almost 40 seconds to say yes when I was asked by the guy running the MVP appointments if it was a a good idea to have an "international" MVP, though I admit that this was because I was stunned into silence for that long about the idea that they would have an MVP for international stuff. Luckily it was by email so me standing with my mouth open in shock was a private thing. 

Anyway, the guy put together instructions for how to rebuild the CRT and MFC to work with MSLU. And he wanted to know what I thought.

Well, I thought it was great idea! Since he did not have a place to post it, I offered to post on my site. And there have been two additional sets of instructions about later versions of the CRT and MFC, both of which were also posted. And now that I have a whole new place to post that has the Microsoft "not supported" language on every page, I decided to post it again. Because it was a great thing that Ted did and the more people who use MSLU who get to see it, the better. So here are links for the various versions:

      MFC/CRT VERSIONS:      6.0      7.0      7.1      8.0

I cannot claim to have a full enough understanding of the ins and outs of each one to answer questions, but I would suggest that a post to the NNTP or HTML versions of the microsoft.public.platformsdk.mslayerforunicode newsgroup will get a good response from a group of people who offer something that is just as good as "official support" from Microsoft. You can get the best efforts from a group of people who really care about trying to help people use a technology that allows developers to write Unicode applications.

And in case I was not clear enough, Ted rocks.

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