The Windows Runtime (WinRT) is the underlying runtime for Windows 8 Store Apps (“Metro”), but some of it can be actually used outside the Metro environment, in regular desktop apps, such as pure Win32, MFC, etc.
There are several ways to go about it; most of the time we’ll use the Windows Runtime Library (WRL) to help out with some of the low level details. Or, for a true high level abstraction, we can use the C++/CX extensions to the C++ language (making our code non-standard). But, just for kicks, let’s see how we can access WinRT types with no help at all – just the raw APIs.
We’ll start by opening Visual Studio 2012 and creating a simple Win32 Console application and give it some name (TestWinRT in the screenshot):
WinRT can be viewed as a better COM, and that’s the approach we’ll take. What I want is to be able to access the Windows::Globalization::Calendar class and use it to get the current time.
The first thing we need to do is add some #includes. First, for general C++ thingies:
Next, we need to add the header for the Ro* API functions (the replacement for the classic COM Co* family of functions):
The last #include we’ll need is the one the defines what a Calendar is. Luckily, the required header has the same name as the namespace where Calendar is defined, namely Windows::Globalization:
We’ll need to link with the library that implements all the global functions we’ll use in a minute. This library turns out to be runtimeobject.lib, although this is not specified in any of the function documentations, as far as I could tell. This is probably due to the incomplete nature of the docs at this time.
#pragma comment(lib, "runtimeobject.lib")
Next, we’ll add some using namespace statements to make our life a little easier:
using namespace std;
using namespace ABI::Windows::Globalization;
The namespaces starting with ABI provide the public surface of WinRT. After that, the “regular” WinRT namespaces appear.
It’s time to start coding the main function. First, we need to initialize WinRT, which is done using the RoInitialize function:
In classic COM, this was done with CoIntialize(Ex), and surprisingly enough, replacing the call with CoInitialize(Ex) works as well with WinRT (but I wouldn’t actually do that in a real app). For those who know about COM apartments, the same applies there – the thread must enter an apartment before any WinRT calls can be made – in this case it’s the multithreaded apartment (more on apartments in a future post…); the apartment type is unimportant for our simple example.
Next, we need to create an instance of the Calendar class. For that we need to call RoActivateInstance, the WinRT replacement for the classic COM CoCreateInstance. Contrary to CoCreareInstance, RoActivateInstance uses a string as the class name and not a GUID. That string is represented by an HSTRING – the WinRT string. Here’s how to create one and get the calendar instance:
HRESULT hr = ::WindowsCreateString(className.c_str(), className.size(), &hClassName);
hr = ::RoActivateInstance(hClassName, &pInst);
WindowsCreateString is the WinRT API to create an HSTRING, which is an immutable character array. In C++/CX, it’s wrapped by the Platform::String class, but here we’re using the raw API. RoActivateInstance returns a pointer to IInspectable*, which is the new base interface in WinRT (still inherits from IUnknown). We’ll take a look at how the class is located in a few moments.
Next, we need the actual ICalendar interface – this requires a QueryInterface call (I’m omitting error handling for brevity):
hr = pInst->QueryInterface(__uuidof(ICalendar), (void**)&pCalendar);
That’s it. We’re ready to use the calendar. Here’s an example:
INT32 hour, minute, second;
cout << "Time: " << setfill('0') << setw(2) << hour << ":" << setw(2) << minute << ":" << setw(2) << second << endl;
We should clean up properly:
Running the application produces the following:
Where does the class come from?
In classic COM, CoCreateInstance accesses the registry at HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID, looking for the class ID and then loads the DLL (assuming it’s a DLL), calls some global function (DllGetClassObject), etc. What about WinRT?
Let’s set a breakpoint before the call to RoActivateInstance and fire up Process Monitor, looking for registry, process and file activity. Here’s the filter configuration of ProcMon, focusing on our TestWinRT.exe process:
Stepping over the RoActivateInstance line and stopping ProcMon’s event gathering shows where the registry is searched:
It’s similar to the classic COM case, but the search is based on the full class name and not the GUID. That one points to the GUID. Here’s a snapshot from the registry:
After all these registry lookups, the correct DLL is finally loaded:
As with classic COM, a class factory is required and obtained from the DLL by looking for a particular export, DllGetActivationFactory (as opposed to the classic COM DllGetClassFactory). We want show this in this post.
So, there you have it. We created a WinRT-based Calendar object and used it in a desktop app.
In the second part, we’ll take a look a some shortcuts for working with WinRT from desktop apps.