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Jeremy Falcon
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Cool. Thanks for the report.
Don Box is quiet a guy. I saw him speak at TechEd 2000 in Amsterdam, where he spent the entire lecture behind a lectern. When he finally stopped speaking, he walked out onto the stage and he had't been wearing any trousers the entire time  Very funny guy and not afraid to tell it how it is.
Cool pics too.
Michael
CP Blog [^] Development Blog [^]
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This week's poll, and the serendipitous arrival of a new Joel on Software article[^], sparked some thoughts about how I got into this whole programming thing.
In mid-January, 1995, I got my first job in the software biz, as an Associate QA Engineer at Symantec[^]. I think I impressed my eventual boss not with my half-page résumé, but with the spell checker program that I brought with me to show that I did, in fact, know C++.
Once I was there, my boss gave me a crash course in Win32 stuff, but I was pretty much on my own as far as learning. (Remember this was 1995*, no public 'net yet, certainly no awesome resources like CP, and even back then I had come to the conclusion that Usenet sucked.) After much self-teaching, book-reading, and article-writing, I can say it's been quite a journey. Not always good or enjoyable, but then what is?
The traditional 10 year anniversary gift is, if I'm not mistaken, a 21" widescreen LCD monitor. The collection plate will be passed around now... 
*Gawd I feel so old when I say things like that, or "this was before the net" or "this was before cell phones" or even the dreaded "this was before Google"
--Mike--
LINKS~! Ericahist | 1ClickPicGrabber | CP SearchBar v2.0.2 | C++ Forum FAQ | You Are Dumb
Magnae clunes mihi placent, nec possum de hac re mentiri.
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Nice to know something about you mike. Hey I enjoy reading your articles, your articles taught me to program using COM.
God bless you.
I just saw this entry in your blog from your article. Carry on.
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I got this nice pullover sweatshirt that I can wear when I'm bike riding in the chilly mornings, and it has a handy little sunglasses holder on the front, along with a big tag making sure you don't miss said holder:
What's this? A little loop of fabric is patented? Why yes, number 5,584,074[^] in fact.
So a couple inches of fabric and some stitches that do this with my sunglasses:
warrant patent protection?
I especially like claim number 1(b):a first of said ends being attached to said shirt at said seam at a first point, and a second of said ends being attached to said shirt at said seam at a second point spaced a predetermined distance which is less than said strip length along said seam from said first point, which said predetermined distance defines substantially the widest width of said loop means. 
And we thought software patents were silly... 
--Mike--
LINKS~! Ericahist | 1ClickPicGrabber | CP SearchBar v2.0.2 | C++ Forum FAQ | You Are Dumb
Magnae clunes mihi placent, nec possum de hac re mentiri.
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So, whilst doing some actual work with VC 7 over the past weeks, I've come up with two new things I hate. Second is the resource editor. First is what I'll be bitching aboutcommenting on here: solutions.
"Solution"... ick. I haven't encountered solutions since my high school chemistry class. Let the marketdroids play with Windows and Office and the other stuff that has to appeal to non-techy people. They can talk about Office 20XX being "the solution" for whoever's troubles. But keep marketing-speak out of my IDE, for two reasons. 1) It's a horrible replacement for the old term "workspace", and 2) I feel like I'm a marketdroid when I say "solution" to someone else. :shiver: 
But if it were just as bad as having to do a mental s/solution/workspace/g during my day, it wouldn't be hateful. The real offender is the new project system. I already stumbled over this back in my early days of using VC 7 (read about it here[^]). The way it works is:- A solution contains a number of projects
- A project contains a number of configurations
- A solution configuration is a list of projects and project configurations
This is, by itself, not bad, aside from the overloaded use of "configuration." However, it gets better:- At any point, there is a current solution configuration
- At any point, there is a "StartUp Project"
You select the current solution configuration using the combobox in the Standard toolbar. This is the list of projects and build targets that gets built when you hit F7. The StartUp project is the project that gets run (and built, if necessary) when you hit F5.
Where it gets hateful is that while the preset solution configurations and the preset project configurations have the same names, they are not the same things. You could set the MyApp Debug solution configuration to build MyStaticLib|ReleaseMinSize and MyApp|DebugUnicode if you wanted to. And with the similar names, it's easy to misunderstand the purposes of the Project|Project Dependencies and Build|Configuration Manager dialogs.
So, assuming that you've correctly processed how the solution/project configs work, you're in for more fun if you have multiple binaries in your solution. To change which one gets debugged by F5, you have to set one as the StartUp project. How do you do this? A simple combo box like the solution config? Hah hah, of course not, foolish mortal. You have to go to the Solution Explorer pane (aka FileView from VC 6), scroll around and/or collapse tree branches until you find the node for the right project, right-click it, and pick Set as StartUp Project. Simple!  And how do you know if you have the right project set as the StartUp project? Again, you have to scroll around in the Solution Explorer pane and look for the one node whose text is bold. That's the only way VC indicates what F5 will do.
Those two things, in combination, replace the simple and obvious "current project" notion in VC 6. What does F7 build? Your current project. What does F5 run? Your current project. 
This is yet another concept relating to projects/solutions that is almost, but not quite, completely unlike the others. Result: much confusion.
--Mike--
Personal stuff:: Ericahist | Homepage
Shareware stuff:: 1ClickPicGrabber | RightClick-Encrypt
CP stuff:: CP SearchBar v2.0.2 | C++ Forum FAQ
----
"That probably would've sounded more commanding if I wasn't wearing my yummy sushi pajamas."
-- Buffy
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The whole configuration/solution/project thing becomes actually useful when your projects no longer have one-to-one dependency, but are like "Debug OEM build with feature X", "Debug Retail build with library Y" etc. and you need to have precise control with which lib, option etc, the whole thing is linked.
I agree that the way MS exposed these settings is somewhat cumbersome though.
Sometimes I use "Batch build" to setup quick and dirty build sequence. It (exposed via toolbar icon or shortcut) works quite well when I need to rebuild some projects and do not want to mess with configurations.
What I am missing though is "build startup project", I presume there might be some obscure thing to do this (like writing a macro in VB  ), but I never needed to venture so far.
From your s/solution/workspace/g remark I assume you are using "The Editor" , if this is the case, do you, by any chance, know, if there is some support/tool/script that allows invoking MSDN on <cword>? I found some undocumented COM interface for MSDN Help 2 engine, but using this will need to write some sort of COM out proc server wrapper, which I want to avoid.
Richard
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