COM number speller

Some time ago, I was asked to provide a way to print numbers as text in Romanian language. Interestingly, I couldn't find an easy way to do this in Excel (Office 2003 as far as I remember). Searching the internet, I found other people having the same problem. Microsoft provides a solution for English language, but not for Romanian.

I decided to create a reusable piece of code that will be easily used in as many environments as possible. I chose COM and ATL to be the solution to my problem. This is also a good programming exercise for my rusty COM / C++ skills and I plan to use it as a template for all my future COM objects.

Points of interest:

• error info support by implementing IErrorInfo interface.
• Help in CHM format and context identifiers specified in MIDL source file.
• BSTR manipulation using CComBSTR class provided by ATL.
• IDispatch support, so the component can be used from scripting environments.
  
• Spelling implementation itself and support for multiple languages (only Romanian and English for now).

To install the COM object just simply run Install.bat
Here is the Excel macro that makes use of NumberSpeller COM object:

Function Spell(n As Currency) As String
'Create the speller object.
Dim s As NumberSpellerLib.speller
Set s = New NumberSpellerLib.speller

Dim o As Object
Set o = s
o.Language = "ro"
Spell = o.Translate(n)
End Function

Downloads:

• full source code, compiled DLL and CHM help: NumberSpeller.zip
  
• C++ sample code: NumberSpellerSample1.zip
  
• Excel sample file: NumberSpellerSample2.zip
  
• JS sample file: NumberSpellerSample3.zip

Blogs and C++ syntax highlighting

This wasn't supposed to be my first post. I wanted to start my blogging existence writing about something else. It proved that being a blogger is not as easy as it should be, especially when trying to post some C++ code. The online editor allows to directly modify the HTML code but this is not the simplest or most enjoyable thing to do. Because I wanted C++ syntax highlighting so hard I decided to create a little tool to automate this task as much as possible and to allow me to focus on the real subject.

The result is cpptohtml.exe that takes a .cpp file as a command line argument and generates a .html file. If no file name is provided as argument, a standard "file open" dialog allows the user to specify the source .cpp file. The tool also accepts /C as command line arguments. When used the source code is taken from clipboard and the HTML result is put also in clipboard.

I found creating a windows shortcut to cpptohtml.exe very useful. This way I can launch the tool by pressing a shortcut key combination (CTR+ALT+T).
I'm gonna use this tool like this:

• open preferred IDE and copy the C++ source code into the clipboard.
  
• launch the tool using the shortcut key combination. The HTML result is in the clipboard.
• paste the formated HTML in the online blog editor.

Download:
You can find here the full source code and the executable. I used Visual C++ and LEX. The archive also contains a .js script to automate the shortcut creation. I am pretty happy with the final result and how C++, LEX and JScript combines to automate a boring repetitive task.

Beautiful the technology is!