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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Relaunched my website!

I finally got the mood to do what was long overdue and recreate my website from the ground up. People who visited ColinFinck.de within the past decade must have had the impression that I vanished without a trace. Whereas in reality, I had just been extremely busy with ReactOS, Rust, and my daily job at ENLYZE. There …

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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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nt-hive: A Rust crate for parsing Windows registry hive files

I have embraced the Rust programming language since my unikernel thesis 3 years ago, and at my daily job at ENLYZE I get to use it everyday for implementing parsers for machine protocols. What had been missing so far was a Rust project that combines my passions for Rust and ReactOS. Aiming to fix this, I’m …

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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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