The continued diary of an experienced C++ programmer. Thoughts on C++ and other languages I play with, Emacs, functional, non functional and sometimes non-functioning programming.
Quick update to the previous post - it looks like at least some of the videos from GoingNative 2012 are now available on the Channel9 page.
It’s almost time to go back for the second day, but before I do I’d like to suggest that if you haven’t had a chance to attend in pereson or watch the livecast, see if you can find the videos online. My understanding is that they should be available - I’m writing this on my phone so I can’t be bothered to look at the moment but I’ll check later.
I had to reinstall VS2010 at work and because I clearly didn’t think this all the way through, forgot to save my autoexp.dat file before removing the old installation. And of course I didn’t realise what had happened until I had to dig deeper into some Qt GUI code that wasn’t quite working as expected, and of course I was prompted with the raw data.
Fortunately a quick search on Google led me to this page Human Machine Teaming Lab | Knowledge / Qt that contains a very comprehensive set of visualisers. I’d highly recommend them if you’re doing any sort of work with the Qt libraries. Just keep in mind that the Qt visualisers are for Visual Studio 2008 and 2010, so they’re anything but guaranteed to work with newer versions.
Just came across a link to this link collection that I think will be useful to C++ programmers:
If you’re looking for a quick introduction to Boost.Test that covers the main features you’re likely to use, I would recommend looking at this blog post:
a little madness » Blog Archive » C++ Unit Testing With Boost.Test
For those who are using Visual Studio 2010, the service pack has now been officially released:
Edit: The download like doesn’t seem to work for me yet, given that it’s only gone General Availability today it might be worth checking back a little later.
Edit again - we have a general availability download link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=75568aa6-8107-475d-948a-ef22627e57a5&displaylang=en
Check if you’re seeing the following output in the build pane:
InitializeBuildStatus:
Creating ".unsuccessfulbuild" because "AlwaysCreate" was specified.
I’ve just fixed a bunch of these errors in one of our solutions here and all of these were caused by one of two issues:
In order to find out if there are missing files that trigger the perma-rebuild, you’ll also have to enable Visual Studio’s debug output as described in this stackoverflow answer.
Yes, it’s one of those “note to self” posts, but I keep forgetting how to do it.
As the first step, you run dumpbin /EXPORTS and redirect the output into a file because the utility that unmangles the names (undname.exe) doesn’t appear to be able to take piped input via stdin. Then, run undname
At least that way the symbols become mostly readable.
I recently ran into a requirements for retrofitting a logging library to an existing project. My first instinct was to throw Pantheios at it as I’ve used it before and It Just Worked. Unfortunately in this case, we needed the ability to log to more than two event sinks and it looked like this was getting a little awkward with Pantheios, which prompted me to look at Boost.Log.
After some digging through the documentation and the samples, I managed to get the logging going to the three event sinks we needed. So far, so good, but every time I started up the program it reported an unhandled exception on Windows 7 when it was trying to initialise the simple_event_log backend and the software wasn’t run as administrator. Curiously enough, the log messages still did appear in the event log, just with lots of unnecessary decoration.
A piece of code I recently worked with required data structures that hold unique, sorted data elements. The requirement for the data being both sorted and unique came from it being fed into std::set_intersection() so using an std::set seemed to be an obvious way of fulfilling these requirements. The code did fulfill all the requirements but I found the performance somewhat wanting in this particular implementation (Visual Studio 2008 with the standard library implementation shipped by Microsoft). The main problem was is that this code is extremely critical to the performance of the application and it simply wasn’t fast enough at this point.