Kon and Bal - NSWindowController won't show my window

I am trying to rationalized the Windows idea of a MainFrame with the Cocoa document model, and in that deal with the meshing of C++ and Cocoa. Out the box Cocoa will give you a window per document - but infinitely configurable cocoa gives you the tools to skin the cat as you want it.

What I have been trying to do is get my C++ MainFrame to create a NSWindowController (subclass) and to create and show the window. This sounds easy enough - and indeed should be. The steps are like this:

• Add a nib with the window and the FileOwner being the window controller.
• Add a call to [myController initWithWindowNibName:@"NibName"] to load the nib.
• Show the window with [myController showWindow:blah]

But nothing happened. The window did not show.

I had a problem like this six or eight months ago with another project I was working on and I had not connected the window to the controller in my nib. Sure enough there it was. But the problem did not go away.

In the debugger I could see that the controller had a window and that window's flags showed that it had become visible - but still no window was visible. Once I saw the window for the briefest moments - but flipping windows when messing with the debugger made it unrepeatable.

In the end I went back to an old technique of debugging that I fall back to when I can't fathom things like this. I created a subclass of NSWindow and overrode the alloc, dealloc and some other key methods, and changed the nib so that my window was of this type. In the implementation of my TestWindow class I did no more than called the parent method. What this did was allow me to put breakpoints on the window's key life cycle moments. What was going on in my head was the thought that either that somehow:

• I was not creating a window at the right moment (what this might mean I did not know)
• The window was not being shown - the calls that would show the window where not being made.
  
• The window was being disposed immediately after I had created it.
  

As few moments in the debugger and I could see that my dealloc was being called. The controller was being disposed in an AutoReleasePool - I had an owner count problem.

BAL: Nasty.

KON: Yeah.