I Love that New Syntax Smell

It begins... This will be a new series of articles. I'll start with some ports of existing samples (from here ), and move into some original material. I want to take a Managed C++ (and specifically a Whidbey C++) approach to Windows Forms, and investigate...

As is often the case, I wrote a small program to do something useful for myself. I have a (Win32) copy of the unix “which” utility, but I wanted something that would simultaneously search my path, include, and lib environment variables. What...

Where you been? Yes, it's true, I've been fairly silent. But I assure you, my reason(s) are good. Mostly, I've been skiing in Colorado, or really busy. But I'm back at work, and once I catch up on the email, there will be more tasty posts from yours truly...

Garrett asked: If the source text is in a CLR String, and we want to pass(even read-only) to unmanaged code, it appears that there is no way to get a pointer to the String's buffer directly. We have to use the marshalling stuff to get it there,...

Garrett asks: You mentioned: class A{}; array ^ arr = gcnew array (10);. Are you saying that whidbey will support this? What is it doing to the native pointer? Boxing? Managed array of native pointers to native objects? This didn't work in Everett...

Garrett returns with some observations: Damn Cool. My only reservation is that it doens't *resemble* a native array, but that's ok too :) In some ways that is far better than the alternative. I was never quite thrilled about the cryptic nature of...

So, Raj asks: Thanks for the explanation but what is the deal with the IL and JIT. Why not just prejit the code? Why not pre-jit the code? Class, you didn't do the required reading . :) Actually, there are a couple of optimization reasons why...

Dave asks: i have tried some UI examples in the book, but it was quite slow. when I execute the program, it takes 1.5-2seconds to see the window on the screen, on the other hand plain win32 api creates window before 1st second. doesn't .net generate...

Some background. In Managed Extensions, the CLI Array was exposed using the keyword __gc [] . If you wanted a CLI array of, say, ten int s named arr , you did: int arr __gc [] = new int __gc [10]; . Then, access into the array worked much like native...

Reader Dave commented: back to lack of visual c++ .net examples. I saw that there are lots of c# examples, this is good because C# is a new language and if i am correct, it is built for .net. there are vb.net examples, too, but there is not a visual...

Reader Dave asks: I am using Visual Studio 7.0 (2002?). I turn on my computer in the morning, and run it until midnight and my visual studio is always open. however, it consumes 60-150MB Virtual memory, specifically when i use VisualPerl (I usually...

A bit of background. You may recall CLI operators in Managed Extensions: op_Equality, op_Addition, ... so on and so forth. To be sure, not the friendliest set of operators ever, as you had to remember what their names were in order to overload them. ...

Mono (very different from mono ), is, at its core, an implementation of the Common Language Specification - which we purposefully made public domain through ECMA . Mono is pretty cool, too, and I'm personally glad to see it. They even praise the standard...

I've added a new post category: post responses, specifically for answering posts. That way, if you're not interested in that, or if you're only interested in that, you can use the links at left to help filter my communique. By the way, the intention of...

Garrett points out: I *am* a tad sad that C++ tends to lag a generation behind C# on features in .NET. I realize that's likely due to the larger effort required, with less resources than C#, and it seems that C++ is less ...sexy... than C#, but...

I thought this deserved a post, and not be buried in a comment.  Dave asks: Wow! it seems you are empowering c++ for CLR. will .net be available for non-windows platforms? IT ALREADY IS!   Being Microsoft, you'd think .NET would be a Windows...

Garrett asked some further questions that were also good.  Good enough, in fact, that I didn't know the answers.  So I went down the hall and asked Brandon .  I'll paraphrase what Brandon told me here. 1. What about partial types? What are partial...

Garrett Serack made some comments on my last blog entry that I thought were interesting enough to share with everyone.  He asks: And how about forward source-level compatability between .net 1.1 and whidbey? Is the current batch of Managed C++ gonna...

The powers-that-be in charge of the GotDotNet have decided to discontinue the blogs on this site. We're being asked to propogate our blogs over to weblogs that are provided by asp.net. Believe me, if I had my choice, I would stick with BlogX and...

An introduction to the CLR concept of boxing and how to avoid (or use) it in Whidbey C++....

A bit about myself.   I'm an SDET (Software Design Engineer in Test) working on the front end of the Visual C++ compiler.  My day-to-day tasks include running tests, investigating results, submitting bugs, and writing tests to provide extra coverage on...

First, I should apologize for the lack of postings lately.  A combination of server downtime/outages and apathy have kept me from making postings.  Now that we're back up, I think I should clarify some of what I've said. Value types aren...

A while back, in order to get some code to compile, I had to update PtrToStringChars (found in vcclr.h) to work in the new Whidbey C++. In case anyone wants this, I've posted my implementation (and a small main() to drive it) here: p2sc.zip . ...

I was going to give a short introduction to the C++ handle (^) today.  But, Brandon did such a good job, I think I'll just link to his article .

We've got a code sample today, of a simple integer stack implemented using Whidbey C++.  I'll implement it using three pieces of code: stack.h - definition of the stack stack.cpp - implementation of the stack main.cpp - driver...