selil wrote: Academic papers and dissertations are written not for the public, but for a fairly small community who may number in the dozens or fewer. Academic papers are not about teaching, but about communicating to the scholar’s community research. The peer review and referee process for most scholarly papers is stringent, ego shattering, and stressful. A PH.D dissertation may have as few as a dozen reviewers who all are TRYING to make the material as difficult to comprehend as possible. Remember that a dissertation is expanding the science within its topic, and it is a final exam. I agree except I have seen many books in the Computer Science field have the same feeling to it ... vocabulary and structure being unnecessarily complex, as if they are trying to impress. If one is reading a dissertation, all bets are off, but a book should be comprehensible...

1. How they can call a type(class name) CObject. As long an object is an instance of a class, How they can call a class 'CObject' ??? The idea is that all objects in MFC are based on it ... much as object in Java and C# 2. Extreme encapsulation!!! -I've seen this in MFC/ATL implementations: If they have C++ classes usually they make data members private and provides public functions for access Them as read/write (Set***(), Get***), so instead writing obj.member=5; you write obj.SetMemebr(5); and type t = obj.member; you write type t = obj.GetMember(). -On the other hand when you use some COM components type libraries By default (!raw_interfaces_only) they wrap the ccom_ptr In the *.tli generated files around the interfaces 'transforming' The interface method calls (__declspace(propput=)...) po->SetVar(type) into po->_var=type; which is the other way around. So finally the cool thing is when we have the possibility of right member access we wrap function calls and when we have function calls We wrap direct member access call. Isn’t this weird? As others have said its good style to have setters and getters, especially for setters ... Maybe you want a member to be restricted to 1..100 .. How would you do that otherwise ? Maybe you have a member that constantly needs to be refreshed ... say the exchange rate for Euros to US Dollars. Just returning the current value stored would do no good, and constantly updating the value may be inefficent ... so just make sure you have the current value when you need it. This is dealt with in other languages via properties ... getters and setters kinda hidden in the syntax.

Don't know for sure if this will help, as I never worked on C++ working with C#, but I was looking into __gc* pointers in the the .NET docs ... I wonder if that would help you. Good luck, Jerry