Hot on the tails of the midterm survey for Summer of Code, I achieve a breakthrough on the Win32 implementation of AbiCollab. I’ve made a few medium-size commits working to get the Win32 API and dialog resources in external executable images working. I had what seemed to be correct code, but I was getting a bogus (actually, 0) handle from Windows. One brief email to the Dev list later, and Dom suggests that perhaps the define for the DllMain function should be wrapped in an extern “C”. (That’s a 12-character patch, for those of you who are counting.)

Anyway, that was in fact the last piece needed: immediately after adding that and compiling, I got the following screenshot! As you can see, my very simple dialog primarily based off of the Tabs dialog is being displayed! In this shot (and SVN), none of the buttons are actually hooked up to anything, so once the dialog comes up your AbiWord fun is over until you kill the process, but I fixed that too, along with working on some code cleanups. Now that I have something workable that I can play with, development should go much more rapidly.

Thanks go to Sum1 who helped me debug my dialog code, and Dom for the missing piece, and Uwog for being a great mentor!

Keep hacking, ants!