What Do You Want Me To Write About?

The third installment of my Windows with C++ column should be out next month and I am starting to think about what I will be writing about next year. It looks like I’ll be writing 5 articles for this column next year and I thought I would follow the lead of fellow columnist Charles Petzold and ask you, dear reader, what you would like me to write about.

I’m happy to write about any topic that touches on Windows and C++. It could be plumbing topics like WinHTTP or Peer-to-peer. It could be graphics topics like Windows imaging or WPF bitmap effects. It could even be Windows Server Virtualization.

Comments or emails welcome (kennykerr@gmail.com).

© 2007 Kenny Kerr

5 Comments

  • How about Windows Presentation Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation? thanks!

  • Some topic ideas:

    Legitimate approaches to WPF from C++ would be welcomed. e.g. Using XAML from C++, Coding directly against WPF classes from C++/CLI. Moving from MFC (hint: WPF doesn't have MDI -- what's a poor MFC dev to do in the new world order?)

    Highlight C++ strengths such as templates and richer operator overloading. e.g. we overload |= operator to 'glue' objects together -- C# can't do that! e.g.
    window.content = button1 |= button2 |= button3;

    Refactoring your C++ code

    C++ unit testing approaches. Do any existing fwks work? why/why not? How about some custom classes or tools to make it as easy as the C#/Java folks have it.

    Help us take XP approaches back from C#/Java! or let C++ show as a first-class citizen in that world.

    Calling WS from C++ -- e.g. JSON, etc.

    Using msbuild for your C++ project. doh! MS doesn't allow that. boo!

    I'm sure I'll think of more...

  • It would be nice to see some article around mixed mode C++ programming for real life application. What are the pros and cons of each mode.

  • KeReleaseSpinLock: My 3rd Windows with C++ article should be available around the 15th of November. I don't know why its showing up in the RSS feed already.

    To set expectations, I wrote it a few months back and does not specifically address your request but hopefully you will still get something out of it as it introduces some of the new classes in WTL 8 which are well worth taking advantage of.

  • Thanks Kenny. Take your time. I'm taking a while to come up to speed with STL/ATL/WTL actually. I have been coding in "C" for win32 too long! :-) These vectors & lists etc. from todays C++ are way cool!! I'm having fun just messing with these containers alone. Sorting a STL list with .sort() etc. push_back() and so on. I'm planning to mix that string manipulation power (where in the old days I would have use strcpy/strcat etc.) with my ATL COM objects.

    Cheers!

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