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
In a recent post I wrote about Code Contracts in .NET. Now you can find a more detailed article on this topic at sharparena.com. In this article I’m providing more information and examples on: pre-conditions post-conditions object invariants asserts and assumptions quantifiers In additions, you should check the official user documentation, which can be found … Read more
Visual Studio 2010 has support for code contracts that allow to express pre-, post-conditions and invariants to your .NET code. Let’ say you want to create a function to return a random value in a range. This could look like it: class Program { Random rng = new Random(); public int GetRandom(int min, int max) … 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
One of the new features in .NET 4.0 is the BigInteger class. This was suppose to be part of 3.5 framework, but after the CTP it was gone. Now it’s back. This big integer is a really large integer representation. However, I was not able to find the precision documented anywhere. The class is available … 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