docs/doxygen/overviews/roughguide.h

   1 /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
   2 // Name:        roughguide.h
   3 // Purpose:     topic overview
   4 // Author:      wxWidgets team
   5 // Licence:     wxWindows licence
   6 /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
   7
   8 /**
   9
  10 @page overview_roughguide A Quick Guide to Writing Applications
  11
  12 @tableofcontents
  13
  14 To set a wxWidgets application going, you will need to derive a wxApp class and
  15 override wxApp::OnInit.
  16
  17 An application must have a top-level wxFrame or wxDialog window. Each frame may
  18 contain one or more instances of classes such as wxPanel, wxSplitterWindow or
  19 other windows and controls.
  20
  21 A frame can have a wxMenuBar, a wxToolBar, a wxStatusBar, and a wxIcon for when
  22 the frame is iconized.
  23
  24 A wxPanel is used to place controls (classes derived from wxControl) which are
  25 used for user interaction. Examples of controls are wxButton, wxCheckBox,
  26 wxChoice, wxListBox, wxRadioBox, and wxSlider.
  27
  28 Instances of wxDialog can also be used for controls and they have the advantage
  29 of not requiring a separate frame.
  30
  31 Instead of creating a dialog box and populating it with items, it is possible
  32 to choose one of the convenient common dialog classes, such as wxMessageDialog
  33 and wxFileDialog.
  34
  35 You never draw directly onto a window - you use a <em>device context</em> (DC).
  36 wxDC is the base for wxClientDC, wxPaintDC, wxMemoryDC, wxPostScriptDC,
  37 wxMemoryDC, wxMetafileDC and wxPrinterDC. If your drawing functions have wxDC
  38 as a parameter, you can pass any of these DCs to the function, and thus use the
  39 same code to draw to several different devices. You can draw using the member
  40 functions of wxDC, such as wxDC::DrawLine and wxDC::DrawText. Control colour on
  41 a window (wxColour) with brushes (wxBrush) and pens (wxPen).
  42
  43 To intercept events, you add a DECLARE_EVENT_TABLE macro to the window class
  44 declaration, and put a BEGIN_EVENT_TABLE ... END_EVENT_TABLE block in the
  45 implementation file. Between these macros, you add event macros which map the
  46 event (such as a mouse click) to a member function. These might override
  47 predefined event handlers such as for wxKeyEvent and wxMouseEvent.
  48
  49 Most modern applications will have an on-line, hypertext help system; for this,
  50 you need wxHelp and the wxHelpController class to control wxHelp.
  51
  52 GUI applications aren't all graphical wizardry. List and hash table needs are
  53 catered for by wxList and wxHashMap. You will undoubtedly need some
  54 platform-independent @ref group_funcmacro_file, and you may find it handy to
  55 maintain and search a list of paths using wxPathList. There's many
  56 @ref group_funcmacro_misc of operating system methods and other functions.
  57
  58 @see @ref group_class
  59
  60 */