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How to Distribute a Program on the Internet

My husband developed the WordPal Vocabulary Builder program to help people prepare for the SAT and GRE tests. He has currently developed two versions; A pocket PC version and a Windows version. He developed the Pocket PC version using Microsoft eMbedded Visual C++ 4.0 and he developed the Windows version using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003. He gave me the responsibility of distributing them on the internet. In order to do so I had to overcome some challenging hurdles.

It took a lot of research to figure out how to do all this and to do it with minimal expense. Hopefully this guide will help you get going in the right direction. Below I have described how I accomplished each task.

How to change or add an icon to .exe program:

The first thing you need to do is create an icon. Neither my husband nor I are very artistic, so being on a budget and being short on time we created a very simple icon. One thing that I didn't realize is that each icon file can have several sizes and color depths associated with it. For our purpose, we only needed a 16x16 256 color and a 32x32 256 color. Without both of these sizes, our icon was not displaying under certain circumstances.

 

My husband originally designed the icon using Visual Studio .NET 2003; File > New and selecting type icon. He ran into problems saving the icon as both a 16x16 and a 32x32, so I created the icon file using Microangelo Studio which is part of the Toolset which is part of the Value Pack. You can download the 21-day trial here.The nice thing about it is that it has a text tool to allow you to easily create letters/words in your icon. To create different sizes just select Tools>New Image Format then File > Save when you are done

 

I also found a very good free program called AWicons Lite, however, the free version is for home use only.

 

Once you have the icon created for both sizes, the icon must be defined in your .cpp and your resource.h files.

 

.cpp example (IDI_WORDPAL is the icon file)

 

resource.h example (IDI_WORDPAL is the icon file)

Note: If you define more than one icon file, the .cpp will always use the first one defined in your resource.h file not matter what name you have declared in your .cpp file. I guess it is some Microsoft bug.

 

That's about it for the icon stuff. Next, I will cover how I created the setup programs to install the WordPal Vocabulary Builder program.


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