About code. Mostly on C++
The MVP Global Summit 2011 took place in Redmond and Bellevue at the beginning of March. This year I attended for the fifth time, and as usual it was a great time. Fellow MVPs, discussions with the Microsoft product groups, parties, everything made it worth it. And this year it was also a little bit … Read more
Channel9 recently posted a video with the Parallel Computing Concurrency Runtime team talking, mainly, about tasks and continuations, new features to the Parallel Patterns Library. These are already available through the ConcRT Extra’s Sample Pack. You can watch the half hour interview with the team here. Besides the new stuff they shown, I particularly liked … Read more
I’ve ran recently across this question: how to find (using C++) if a computer is a laptop? That is possible with WMI and many answers (such as this) point to the Win32_SystemEnclosure class. This class has a member called ChassisTypes, which is an array of integers indicating possible chassis types. At least one of them … Read more
A window’s system menu (now called simply window menu) features by default commands like Move, Size or Close. (When the user selects one of these commands a WM_SYSCOMMAND message is sent to the window.) What if you want to remove and add these commands on the fly? Here is how you can do it. This … Read more
It is possible to register both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the same COM server on 64-bit machine. This leads to several questions such as how are they registered and which one of the two is used. I will try to answer them below. But first, let’s start with an example. Example Let’s say we … Read more
I’m working on a project to port a 32-bit application for the x64 platform. The first errors that came up when building for x64 were related to inline ASM code, which is no longer supported in VC++ for x64. VC++ has an inline assembler built within the compiler, so you could write assembly code directly … Read more
If you want to port an existing 32-bit application for the x64 platform (especially since 32-bit processors will soon be history), or if you want to target x64 for a new application, the first step in building for x64 is setting up your solution. In this post I will explain what are the steps in … Read more
Two days ago I posted a simple implementation of a game of colors. Though it was intended only as an exercise, someone has criticizes the use of an int** to hold the grid information, mainly for two reasons: the footprint on 64-bit platforms can get nasty the explicitly allocated memory, instead of using a std::vector … Read more
One of the games I like the most on my new phone is about covering a grid formed by cells of different colors with a single color within a limited number of moves. After playing it again and again for a week, I decided to write my own game for the PC. The rules are: … Read more
In the past months I have written about what’s new in Visual Studio 2010 with regard to Visual C++. In this post I will summarize these articles. MSBuild and multi-targeting Visual Studio 2010 changes for VC++ (part 1) IntelliSense and Browsing (#include auto completion, call hierarchy, red squiggles, find all references, class wizard) Visual Studio … Read more