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Recently while making a bug fix to our selection tracking code I discovered an unexpected behavior with CComPtr<T> instances. The crux of the fix included creating a new tracking mechanism exposed via COM in the type ISelectionTracking.
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People love to chat about how to conduct a C++ interview on newsgroups . Eventually these topics will shift into a discussion about what questions a candidate must know in order for them to get a hire from a particular interview. Unfortunately
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Spent about an hour debugging a bit of code today. I was attempting to read data from a particular source and kept getting back failure codes. After some debugging I discovered the data didn't actually exist in the source I was reading from.
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This is a more amusing than functional debate I enter into from time to time. On a line where you declare a pointer type in C++, where should the * go? Next to the type (i.e. Type* p1;) Next to the variable name (i.e. Type *p1;) Who cares For the moment
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Recently I got bit by void* again because of another C++ quirk I didn't think through. I had a class which wrapped a void* which could be one of many different structs. The structs were POD and didn't have any shared functionality hence I
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A recent check in of mine raised a few eye brows during reviews. I checked in a few macros which ended with/contained a "do{}while(0)" and people were curious as to why. In my experience there are two main uses for it. Insert an empty statement with no
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Recently I made a very large update to our code base. Our code base lacked a standard way of guarding entry and exit points into the various components. Having said guards is useful for error handling, tracing, reducing redundancy, etc ...
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I was reading a post on Coding Horror the other day about programming books and how developers don't read enough of them. I readily agree with the first two points in the article that 1) most programming books suck and 2) books are sold by weight
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While investigating a crash during a suite run I found the stack walk included the destructor for a CComAutoCriticalSection . This is a fairly reliable class so I immediately suspected my code. I did a couple of quick checks for a double free and didn't
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Thread local storage is another method of synchronization between threads. It is different that most synchronization cases because instead of sharing state between threads it enables developers to have independent, thread specific pieces of data which
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Today what started out as a crash due to a pure virtual call turned into finding a gotcha in CComPtrBase<T>. Essentially the code in question boiled down to the following. Can you spot the problem? void GetAStudent(CComPtrBase<T> &spStudent)
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Reference values are a powerful feature of C++ but I find they have one significant detractor. A developer can not look at an API call and determine if a parameter is being passed by reference or value (VB has the same problem). IMHO this is one item
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CComObject::CreateInstance is a light weight method for creating instances of COM objects in your code. Unfortunately the design of the API makes it easy to introduce subtle errors into your code. The two problems are it encourages manually ref counting
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ATL has a lot of great tools for COM programming and CComPtr is a good example. It's a smart pointer class which manages the reference count of an underlying COM object. One of it's limitations though is it will only work properly when the inheritance
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Recently I had a half day adventure trying to catch a SafeIntException in code I was writing. The particular function involved a bit of math with user controlled values. Writing a bunch of IfFailGo's with several TryAdd style API's was getting tiresome
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