[celerate]

I've always wondered how (in terms of code) programs that have some sort of desktop allow programs that were compiled later to access that desktop. In the simplest of terms lets say I have a bitmap buffer of a screen and I want people to be able to compile programs later that would be able to draw themselves to that buffer, how would I do that?

The closest I've ever come to what I'm desrcibing was when I was running a Java program that had two frames that accessed the same static variable, both frames shared that variable, the difference is that now I want to do it with C++ and the code accessing the same variable will be different programs altogether, they will not be compiled together or executed together.

I hope someone can explain this in a fairly simple way, I am also more interested in a portable solution or at the very least something that will work with both GCC and Mingw which are essentially the same compiler.

Keep in mind I'm still quite unexperienced with advanced C++ and if this involves writing shared libraries as I suspect it does you'll be over my head unless you can point me to a good tutorial.

Thanks.