About code. Mostly on C++
.NET allows you to expose components as COM and consume them from unmanaged code. There are many references on how to this (and you can only start with MSDN), and I will not talk about that part. What I want to explain here is something different. Suppose you have this interface: [Guid(“2F8433FE-4771-4037-B6B2-ED5F6585ED04”)] [InterfaceType(ComInterfaceType.InterfaceIsIDispatch)] public interface … Read more
Visual Studio 2010, currently in beta 1, replaces VCBuild with MSBuild as the build system, aligning C++ with the other languages that already used MSBuild. The VC++ team has already posted several articles on it’s blog about the new build system. Channel 9 has published recently a video with Bogdan Mihalcea, a developer in the … Read more
It is often that I see people using namespace directives in header files. This is a bad practice maybe not enought explained, so I will try to clarify why one should always avoid this. When you are using a using directive (such as using namespace std) or using declarations (such as using std::cout) you are … Read more
I’ve found myself in situations when I spent lots of time debugging because of some variables declared in a base class were written in tens or maybe hundreds of places in the whole hierarchy, across one or multiple projects even. How could you find the right place where the value of such a variable changes? … Read more
The new MFC library from Visual Studo 2010 supports another Vista specific feature, the task dialog. This is meant as a replacement for the classic dialog box, and can display command links, customized buttons, customized icons, and a footer. Here is an example of such a dialog (from Windows Server 2008). MFC contains a new … Read more
One of the new features available in MFC in the Visual Studio 2010 CTP is the Restart Manager. This was introduced with Windows Vista to offer support for restarting application when a crash occurs or when an automatic update needs to close and then restart an application. When you create a new MFC project in … Read more
The new C++ standard defines a new keyword, static_assert, that is already available in Visual Studio 2010 CTP. This new feature allows introducing compile time asserts. It takes an expression that can evaluate to bool and a string. If the expression evaluates to false, the compiler issues an error with the given string literal. If … Read more
The new C++0x standard adds lambda expressions to the language. Visual Studio 2010 CTP is already supporting this new feature that brings functional techniques to C++ too. What is a lambda expression? It’s basically a function. In F# it’s an anonymous function, in C# it’s an anonymous delegate; in C++ it’s in fact an anonymous … Read more
The new C++0x standard provides support for type inference. The auto keyword that was doing nothing in C++ was given a new meaning: a placeholder for a type inferred by the compiler. For those familiar with C#’s var keyword, this is basically the same. Here is a comparison between auto in C++ and var in … Read more
Evaluate Expressions – Part 1: The Approaches Evaluate Expressions – Part 2: Parse the Expression Evaluate Expressions – Part 3: Building the Abstract Syntax Tree Evaluate Expressions – Part 4: Evaluate the Abstract Syntax Tree So far we have managed to parse the text representing an expression and build an abstract syntax tree. The only … Read more