A Developer's Experience

Sanjeev and I have published an article - Type Safe Logger For C++ - at CodeProject. Every bit of work is tiresome or little ugly in C++. So is logging - writing application diagnostics to console, file etc. The printf style of outputting diagnostics is primitive and not type safe. The std::cout is type safe but does not have a format specification. Besides that, printf and std::cout know to write only to the console. So we need a logging mechanism that provides a format specification, is type safe and log destination transparent. So we came up with this new Logger to make C++ programmers happy. Following is a short introduction excerpt of the article:- Every application logs a whole bunch of diagnostic messages, primarily for (production) debugging, to the console or the standard error device or to files. There are so many other destinations where the logs can be written to. Irrespective of the destination that each application must be able to configure, the diagnostic log message a...

This is a simple array like class for C++, which can be used as a safe wrapper for accessing a block of memory pointed by a bare pointer. #pragma once template<typename T> class Array { private: T* _tPtr; private: size_t _length; private: bool _isOwner; public: Array(size_t length, bool isOwner = true) : _isOwner(isOwner) { _length = length; _tPtr = new T[length]; } public: Array(T* tPtr, size_t numItems, bool isOwner = true) : _isOwner(isOwner) { if (NULL == tPtr) { throw std::exception("Specified T* pointer is NULL."); } this->_length = numItems; this->_tPtr = tPtr; } public: template<typename TSTLContainerType> Array(const TSTLContainerType& stlContainer, bool isOwner) : _isOwner(isOwner) { _length = stlContainer.size(); _tPtr = new T[_length]; int ind...

This is about a killer bug identified by our chief software engineer in our software. What was devised for ease of use and write smart code ended up in this killer defect due to improper perception. Ok, let us go! CComPtr is a template class in ATL designed to wrap the discrete functionality of COM object management - AddRef and Release. Technically it is a smart pointer for a COM object. void SomeMethod() { CComPtr siPtr; HRESULT hr = siPtr.CoCreateInstance(CLSID_SomeComponent); siPtr->MethodOne(20, L"Hello"); } Without CComPtr, the code wouldn't be as elegant as above. The code would be spilled with AddRef and Release. Besides, writing code to Release after use under any circumstance is either hard or ugly. CComPtr automatically takes care of releasing in its destructor just like std::auto_ptr . As a C++ programmer, we must be able to appreciate the inevitability of the destructor and its immense use in writing smart code. However there is a difference...