If this is a new project, then take a look at using DotNetNuke based cart. I've done several and found that doing the skinning takes longer than getting the cart running. If you are not familiar with DotNetNuke, it is about 80k+ lines of open source VB.Net code that provides a very flexible content management system and is very powerful. And includes a simple cart for free. You can research the various carts at dotnetnuke.com/ marketplace and at snowcovered.com. I use one called CataLook that for $99 is really hard to beat. Most of them have trial versions so you can see which one meets your needs. Tom

Yes, your configuration is how i do my .net projects. However, I have c++/ unmanaged code only with 30+ dlls and 20+ exe files in about 8-10 different solutions and will have over 250K lines when we get done. My problem is that the dlls in one solution are used with other dll and exe solutions (libary files). I REALLY don't won't to have all of the projects required to build an exe in a single solution. This can quickly get to be unmanageable. So, what I need is how to link all of this together is some sort of reasonable build process using VS without having to go to using external make utilities. This why we are having problems today. One option is to dump all output files into a single directory, but I don't think that this is really great either. My real problem is that VS2005 has a huge number of options on how you configure the IDE and projects. And there does not seem to be a good writeup on how to use this "power" to cleanly build our system. Thanks for your response though Tom

We are re-doing our VS2005 project layout and I cannot find any good descriptions on how to configure VS2005 to "cleanly" handle projects composed of multiple static libs, dlls and exes. By this I mean what are optimal way to use VS search paths, environmental variables, projects settings, common projects,... etc. I was wondering if there are any good "best practices" references on how to configure our system. Thanks in Advance

I'm working on a project where I have two projects. #1 is c++ dll. Works just fine #2 is a unit test exe that test's out the DLL. My problem is that when I do a build, I cannot get the dll to automatically copy into my exe's debug directory. I think I'm missing something. I did try using references, thinking that it worked like in c#, but did not solve my problem. Any thoughts on how to do this. Tom

I'm working on a c++ project that is going to have 50+ projects and 15 executables. My problem is that I don't understand how to configure the projects to share common settings. Is there somewhere where I can get a good tutorial on how this is done. My background is vb.net/c# where these questions I understand how to do. Tom

I did a repair install of VS2005 (1.5 hours), and that fixed the problem. It appears some setting somewhere was corrupted. Tom

I did look there first. However, none of them matched my situation close enough. I'm trying not to have to re-install vs2005 to fix problem.

All of a sudden I cannot debug my applications. When I go to start, I get the above error. I'm running VS2005SP1 with unmanged c++ I was able to run the other day, but today i cannot. This is code I'm trying to run (pretty simple) -------------------------------------------------------- int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { return 0; } --------------------------------------------------------------- :confused:Any thoughts:confused: Tom

Does anyone know where we can find a proficiency test for C++. Our HR people are requiring it before we can hire someone. Don't have a choice about this. Tom

I'm been having kind of a running argument about programmer productivity in a c++ type environment about how many line of code a programmer should be producing. YES, I know that this is a hot topic with no good answers. However, I'm looking for suggestions about what would be reasonable number. I've seen stats saying about 9K/year. He is saying about 1k-2k/week of fully debugged code. I think that number is a "little" high. But I don't have any data to back that up. Anyone out there have an idea what a reasonable number is or where I can get some information?

Just to clarify, I can use c++/CLI to link my existing base of unmanaged code developed with VS2002?

I'm somewhat new to managed c++, so I would like a little clarification. We have a large codebase of unmanaged c++ that runs as a plugin in another application (VS2002 rocks/NOT). The plugin world has it own coding rules and libraries that we have to use. We are in the process of writing about 300K lines of code and are looking at c# just for the productivity enhancements. Also, they do not all have to run in the plugin. My question is, is it possible with managed C++ to create a COM object that will link some these C# DLL's with are existing plugin code? This would be a huge help if it is not hard. Thanks in advance. Tom

We are building some rather complex applications that all boil down to computational geometry on a complex collections of object. They are really extensions of 3d CAD systems into the manufacturing systems. We are currently moving from code embedded (think plugin) in CAD system to free standing applications. As a result we really have two issues. The first is a data/object management issue because our data structures become very complex. The text version of the data can be 200+k lines long. So for these routines, C#'s advantages of no pointers and no memory leaks (both big problems currently) will out way performance issues. The questions on performance have to do with parsing speed and dynamic memory management. Our lead programmer thinks that any system with memory garbage collection has to be too slow by definition and therefore not worth consideration. The second is a rendering/computationally issues. These will be fairly tightly defined routines where computational speed is an issue, although a difference of 10-20% probably would not be noticed. Especially as processor speeds increase. We are also going to be recoding these for multi-core support, so ease of threading here will be an issue. In terms of hardware, we are going to be supporting all versions from windows 2000 to vista, both 32 and 64 bit. So porting between these OSs will be a problem. I've seen an article on codeproject that goes over the coding differences between 32 and 64 bit in C++ and it looks like it will be a problem. I believe that .net does this automatically for us. And ultimately Linux, but no customers have requested it. If we limit ourselves to what MONO supports, I think this may be a solution. This is going to be a 6-8 person project for the next couple of years. We are probably looking at 500k lines of code. So overall programmer efficiency is going to be a really big deal. At a minimum I think that we need to move to VS Team, but am going to have to get more info before I can convince the others. Thanks for quick reply. Tom

I'm in a new department that is currently using c++/VS2002. The lead programmer and myself are have a debate over what the performance differences are between c++ and C#. Googling, I can find only a few things and none of them give a really good comparison. My own feelings are that they are fairly similar overall, but I cannot find any proof. Can anyone point me where to look to find the info? Thanks in advance Tom