Fuelmail: the Correspondence

An affinity was growing. The exaggerated qualities of FuelCDP and its website were beyond the bounds of human comprehension. A true artist had been discovered. Brain waves bounced off the ether and the presence of the FuelCDP author and website guru was all around. And it was a sympathetic soul whose presence became known.

For surely this person was no crook. This person had not even whispered the evil word 'shareware'. This person had donated his work of bloatware art to human posterity.

Across the abyss of intelligence there was a strange but kindred soul, bridging the gap between common sense and prejudice, good and bad, lucky and ill-fated, happy and sad, industrial strength and bloated, just as much a man as any one of us.

Then the next email arrived and the bubble broke. One name has been changed to protect the innocent, but for how long we cannot know. The letter is published in its entirety. Only the italics are our own.

> HOLY SMOKES!!!
> How can your program FuelCDP, use all the MFC 4.2
> DLLs from Visual C++,

...Because the Becubed OCXes require them...

> the VB6 Runtime from Visual Basic,

...Because it's a VB program, silly...

> the Borland C++ Runtime Library from Borland C++[Builder],

Ok. Which DLLs would those be?

> AND 2 MicroHelp OCX files plus another VB OCX File????

Actually, they're not MicroHelp OCXes anymore -- Becubed software
has had control over OLETools for quite a while now (several years,
in fact).

The reasoning for using the Becubed tools is simple: I have not
found a way to center text vertically in a label control, as of yet,
and the multiline functionality of the MHTip32 control is excellent.
I have yet to find a code-only replacement for either of these,
although I have been playing around with the idea of using some
sort of API call to fix the VB label control.

> That's absolutely absurd!  Please my friend,
> I am interested in hearing why it is your program
> must feature so much bloat, but I also want to tell
> you in advance to please visit www.vbaccelerator.com
> for complete source-code replacements for at least the
> VB OCX file.

The only reason it's using the MSCOMCTL2.OCX file is because I have
yet to find code-only replacements for the Up/Down control. If it's
at the site you suggest, then I'd be more than happy to implement it.

One of the things I have been doing throughout the production of
FuelCDP has been to minimize the use of extra controls. This has
been achieved fairly extensively, with the use of WinInet.DLL function
calls vs. the Internet Transfer control, replacements for the status
and progess bar controls, and several other things.