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Sijinjoseph (talk | contribs) Add overview of WTL and brief history |
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Most of the WTL API is a direct mirror of the standard Win32 calls, so the interface is familiar to most Windows programmers. Being an unsupported library, WTL has little formal documentation. Faced with this problem the "WTL Documentation" project [http://www.viksoe.dk/code/wtldoc.htm] was started and now has a semi-complete documentation.
==Overview==
Windows Template Library, or WTL, is a set of classes that extend ATL to support more complex user interfaces for either applications or various UI components, while maintaining the big advantage of [[Active Template Library|ATL]] - small and fast code. WTL classes were designed to be the best and the easiest way to implement rich [[Win32]] based UI for ATL based applications, servers, components, and controls.
WTL provides support for implementing various user interface elements, from frame and popup windows, to [[Multiple document interface|MDI]], standard and common controls, common dialogs, property sheets and pages, [[Graphics Device Interface|GDI]] objects, UI updating, scrollable windows, splitter windows, command bars, etc. The WTL classes are mostly templated and use minimal instance data and inline functions. They were not designed as a framework, so they do not impose a particular application model, and can accommodate any. The classes do not use hooks or thread local storage, so they have no restrictions that those techniques impose. They also have no inter-dependencies and can be freely mixed with straight [[SDK]] code. In summary, WTL delivers very small and efficient code, very close in size and speed to [[SDK]] programs, while presenting a more logical, object oriented model to a programmer.
==History==
[[Nenad Stefanovic]] works at [[Microsoft]] and joined the [[Active Template Library|ATL]] team when work was starting on version 2.0, he started working on adding windowing support to the library, as well as doing the composite control support in VC 6.0. WTL was later siphoned off as a separate open source project with Nenad managing it.
==External links==
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