Thanks for the info everyone- it sounds pretty encouraging anyway.

Greetings all! Love the look of this wide-aspect display... especially with the 20 VC++ tool windows docked. Is there anyone out there using one of these for day-to-day development work? Trying to justify the outlay to myself :) Finding buying online a bit scary.

Does anyone know of a CVS plug-in for VisualStudio.NET? Cheers :-D

Hi again, I'm using attributed C++/ATL to create a COM server - I've come across a little annoyance: if I implement an interface on a coclass, i.e. derive from the interface, voila! its in the typelib. I want to keep a few interfaces to myself - I've tried adding the [hidden] attribute to the interface declarations, but no luck. Any suggestions? Nick

Thanks Mike, Will look into that. Since I posted this message I've decided that I'd definitely have to do some funky conditional compilation so that there was no need to link to StartServiceCtrlDispatcher() etc anyway. Maybe using the new attributed ATL I can simply switch the [module] parameters... we'll see :) Thanks again, Nick

Hi all, I'm undertaking a project that will eventually be run as a DCOM server. I anticipate DCOM for Win98/Me will be involved, but right now what I need to know is whether I can create the app as a service with the ATL wizard and run it as a standard EXE on any Win98 box...? Thanks for any help, NB

For anyone interested, http://www.jaggersoft.com/csharp_standard/19.5.htm[^]

Ok, something worries me about array types in C#. Two things actually, the first being the concrete type of an array of C# objects. The following:

SomeClass[] myArr = new SomeClass[10];

creates an object myArr that is of a type derived from System.Array, and specialised for objects of type SomeClass. My first question regards the [] operator. Where does it suddenly spring into the picture? It doesn't exist on objects of type System.Array. The type of the indexer for myArr above is SomeClass it seems, as the compiler won't let me make a statement like:

myArr[0] = new string;

and quite rightly so, complaining that string cannot be converted into SomeClass. Thus the indexer must be part of the interface of the automatically generated derived array type. The wierdness begins when I do this:

object[] mySameArr = myArr;
Console.Write (mySameArr[0]);

Now, this compiles and runs without a problem. How? The interfaces of the derived object[] and SomeClass[] types must be different, because each declares an indexer with a different signature. This probably shouldn't compile, or at least, shouldn't run, because despite SomeClass being derived from object, SomeClass[] is NOT derived from object[]! What's going on? Does the C# compiler fudge this some way, or does the .NET CTS have different relationships between array types that doesn't fit my (somewhat C++ skewed) view? Is this some kind of mock-up of generics that seems like it will be broken once real generics are implemented? My second, and maybe not so confusing, question regards pointers and arrays. This appears in MSDN:

public unsafe int Read(byte[] buffer, int index, int count) 
{
   int n = 0;
   fixed (byte* p = buffer) 
   {
      ReadFile(handle, p + index, count, &n, 0);
   }
   return n;
}

Can anyone tell me where the conversion is made between the byte[] specialisation of System.Array and byte*? Is there a conversion operator defined in that subclass, or is there some other compiler funk going on? Should I be poring through the C# standard? Thanks for any help, and please, if this has come up before (as I'm sure it would have) point me towards the old posting.

Hiya Christian, I work at a company that builds a Windows POS product. To date we've used MFC and in the Dark Ages Borland OWL, but now that .NET has appeared on the scene it appears to be a good candidate for the development of some new and significantly large features we're taking on, not least because of the speed of developing user interfaces, easy memory management, and because we're looking for an alternative database access technology to the outdated BDE, making ADO.NET an attractive candidate. As we move towards an enterprise solution that includes non-POS clients we're considering a more tiered architecture with one or more business object layers. We've done a bit of this with COM already, but also want to consider using .NET objects because of the relative ease of development and apparently flatter learning curve for new developers. Our other choices for moving forward are to stick with MFC, COM/DCOM and probably OLEDB, all good technologies but falling steadily behind the main MS push, I feel. Anyhow, I've got a week to present a summary analysis of the potential use of .NET technologies in our products... When it comes to supporting a decision either way, it looks like my task is a bit harder than I first thought :~ Thanks for the reply (ps, do I remember rightly that you're also hangin' here in sunny Brisbane?)

Hi all, I was wondering if anyone out there could point me towards a good business-focussed discussion of the benefits and pitfalls of developing Windows software, particularly database-centric client/server and n-tier systems, in .NET. Bit of a wish, but any suggestion appreciated.

Thanks, I looked around for a while but unless you know a couple of 'magic keywords' like CCW its pretty hard to search for anything containing .NET and JScript. Thanks again, there are a world of cool possibilities for this stuff :cool:

Hi all, I was wondering if anyone out there had tried using .NET objects from a pre-.NET scripting environment (I want to use Windows Script hosted JScript). I'm sure it is possible through COM interop, but can anyone tell me of an article or web page to get this running quickly and easily? Thanks for any suggestions, Nick

Hi All, I've come in after the weekend to discover that my SQL Server instance (running some new software we've written) has climbed in memory usage a lot more than I'd expect. I'm checking all of the cursors and XML documents used for leaks, but what I'd really like is a tool to track allocations of resources such as these, to tell me straight out where the problem is. I'm sure this must exist... can someone point me in the right direction? Thanks!

Hi all, When outputting a VARIANT from a COM interface member (as an [out] parameter, not [in, out]), should I call ::VariantClear() or ::VariantInit() on the output parameter before assigning to it? Or is this redundant/incorrect? e.g.: STDMETHODIMP MyFunc (/*[out]*/ VARIANT* pVal) { VariantInit (pVal); // ok? pVal->vt = .... ... } cheers NB

can't offer code, but have a look at std::string, from the C++ standard library.. (#include ) - it has members such as find_first_of() and replace() that you should be able to use quite easily to perform the CString::Replace() functionality. happy coding!

Hi everyone :) I'm not sure if this is possible, but I was wondering if there was a way for two threads to concurrently (and reasonably independently) share an SQL Server connection, such as the OLE DB templates CDataSource object? Presently, my attempts have been serialised internally by SQL Server, so that the net effect is that one of the requests must complete before the other can begin... thanks to anyone who can offer some pointers! nb

Hi All, I have a pretty simple CEdit subclass that paints its background with a texture bitmap. When I use it in multi-line mode, with more text than will fit in the window, scrolling upward doesn't cause WM_ERASEBKGND to be sent, and so the top lines are drawn over the old content (yuk!). I've tried handling WM_CTLCOLOR- doesn't make any difference. Any ideas? Thanks NB

Hi all, the exe I've just coded is used by an ASP page running on IIS to generate a zip file containing some XML goo, for download by a client problem being, the file I create is not public... so it looks like I need to use SetFileSecurity() or SetNamedSecurityInfo() to make it visible the trouble is, i'm totally lost trying to use these functions- can anyone point me towards a good, quick example ? thanks :) peace :rose:

this is the perfect place for some cool template code :) any takers?

ha :) I wonder if John Howard's leigions are collecting snaps of our faces :rolleyes: