I’ve been using the latest Visual Studio 2005 beta on and off for the last couple of days. This is the first time I’ve bothered to try “Whidbey” and my initial impressions are very favourable; I’m just using it for unmanaged C++ at present. I haven’t really done a great deal with it yet but even though it’s installed on in a VMWare virtual machine it seems faster and generally less lardy than both VS.
Richard Hale Shaw continues his series of blog postings on “Moving away from C++” with the obligatory “pointers are bad, garbage collection is good” post… I feel the need to write something about this but not yet, I have work to do…
I’ve been working on The Server Framework this week. A client wanted a version of the latest framework with UDP support added. They’d taken the freely available version of the code a couple of years ago and I’d given them some hints as to how they could get it to deal with UDP. This worked well for them and they’ve built a rather large VOIP system on top and now they’re having some performance problems.
OpenSSL is an open source implementation of the SSL and TLS protocols. Unfortunately it doesn’t play well with windows style asynchronous sockets. This article, which was first published in Windows Developer Magazine and then reprinted on my company web site, provides a simple connector that enables you to use OpenSSL asynchronously.
A new posting in the blast from the past reprints area. The article is here.
Roy adds a little fine tuning to Brian’s advice about avoiding setup and teardown in unit tests. In summary; aim to minimise duplication in your test code…
Roy takes issue with Brian’s assertion that a little duplication in your test code is OK. I think the answer is somewhere in between. Roy’s point about duplication in the test code leading to fragility of the tests is valid and his suggestions are good but I’d still lean towards readability over duplication when push comes to shove.
I was just flicking through some of the entries over on Games from Within and I came across an entry on precompiled headers which is a good introduction of the pros and cons of using precompiled headers in a cross platform environment.
I wanted to comment on this posting but the comments seem to be turned off for it now so I’ll comment here…
Noel covers the whys and why nots of precompiled headers a lot better than I did when I wrote about them a while ago, however he fails to mention the “one true way” of using precompiled headers on Microsoft compilers…
Exploring the C++ Unit Testing Framework Jungle over on Games from Within is a really good look at all of the C++ unit testing frameworks out there. It compares the following frameworks:
CppUnit
Boost.Test
CppUnitLite
NanoCppUnit
Unit++
CxxTest
I’m one of those people who has written their own mini framework because none of the existing frameworks seemed to do what I wanted at the time I needed the framework and I wanted to get up to speed quickly with minimal learning time.
Thanks to Ned Batchelder for pointing out the “discussion” about the pros and cons of multi-threaded programming over on the SQLite newsgroup. The comments on Ned’s post are well worth reading; they’ve provided me with a new blog to subscribe to, Jeff Darcy’s Canned Platypus which seems to have lots of the kind of high quality techie stuff that I like.
My view on multi-threading is probably pretty obvious given the way my socket server framework is designed…
I’ve been watching my web server logs in real time for the last couple of days, not intently; I do have a few slightly more interesting things to do. I’ve had a tail of the logs running on the laptop and I glance at it every now and then. What I’ve noticed is that the people who wrote whatever the software is that regularly tries to spam my comments are pretty crap.
I’ve been attempting to boost the number of people reading this blog in the last few weeks. Mainly because the more people there are reading the more likely I am to get feedback in the form of comments and postings that link to me and I find the feedback really useful; having your views challenged is the best way to learn…
Anyway, I started off by reading a load of good stuff over on Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger blog and one of the postings was about a service called BlogExplosion.
