Miscellaneous

This program presents an original way of the famous Rubik's Cube by an assembly of 27 multi-colored cubies isolated in the space. Even during its deformations, it allows a 3D vision of the cube thanks to the basic MFC graphic functions. This simulation can also rapidly calculate a solution to reordering the Cube.

Discover how to start and control a third party GUI application, particularly the Notepad text editor, from your own C++ applications.

This article describes how to create stack based allocators for use with STL containers.

Vectors are one of the single most useful and most used objects in the STL. They are easy to use, and remove the burden of memory management from the user. It is possible to partially control memory usage by using functions like reserve, but nothing is provided to free up excess memory. Users have come up with ways to trim a vector by hand, but with the advent of the new C++0x and its move semantics, the classic solution of copy-swaping has become excessively expensive. This article seeks to find a better solution.

The article gives an example of false-sharing in multi-threading programming using C++0x std::thread.

You're often required to repeat identical pieces of initialization code in every constructor of a class that declares multiple constructors. That's because unlike a few other programming languages, The C++ programming language doesn't allow a constructor to call another constructor of the same class. Luckily, this problem is about to disappear with the recent approval of a new C++0x feature called delegating constructors which are explained in this C++ tutorial.

If you're building Windows Mobile apps FakeGPS could be the answer to your troubleshooting worries. Learn how to test your GPS applications using FakeGPS.

Jump Lists provide a simple and convenient way for users to open documents and perform common tasks, and Windows 7 provides basic support for Jump Lists with no explicit application development. C++ developers can improve their applications by using the MFC class CJumpList to provide custom jump list items for easier application interaction.

Learn about a comprehensive method of getting the Windows version and differentiate among the various editions.

An unsuccessful attempt to compare PVS-Studio (VivaMP) and Intel C/C++ ("Parallel Lint")

In today's environment prototyping your UI can be paramount. This article will show users how to use the Microsoft Expression Blend 3 prototyping tool and discuss the differences between static, interactive and convertible prototypes.

Though the Clipboard is one of the fundamental parts of the Windows operating system, there is little information about how it works, especially in the low level. In this article, I'm going to tell you something about the Clipboard internals by showing how you can forbid access to it.

Learn how to use Windows Azure and Azure Storage to store, retrieve and update information in Table storage, pass work between multiple cloud service roles using Queue storage and use the Azure SDK StorageClient project to speed up Azure Storage development.

Demonstrates the basics of writing a Windows Debugger.

In this article we will consider the methods of hooking keyboard data in the kernel mode. The described approaches can be used for solving the tasks of keystroke analysis, blocking and also redefining some combinations.

Understand from this guide how and when - as well as when not - to use multithreading.

Read about a sample demonstrating how to accelerate finding an optimal Puzzle 15 solution using C++ Template Metaprogramming. It presents an implementation of the IDA* search algorithm.

Even the best-written C++ applications can crash or hang-and end-users' perceptions of the application hinge on how gracefully the application works with the operating system to handle such problems. By registering your applications with Windows Application Recovery and Restart, they can recover gracefully after errors occur.

System Integration that was one of the least considered areas in IT is now receiving a lot of attention. Learn about the types of integration and as well as about formats and modeling.

Generate multiple (on-screen)Virtual Keyboards to include into your portable application via a DLL, so that your users can take theirlanguage/keyboard with them on their travels, even if the PC they use does not have their home keyboard installed.

Visual C++ 2010 includes a number of new features for preventing data inconsistencies due to simultaneous updates of memory locations - a key challenge in parallel development.

Check out this commercial-grade cross-platform Harel UML StateChart open-source application framework named StateWizard for concurrent, distributed, and real-time reactive system development with simplicity, efficiency, and scalability.

DirectWrite is a new API to render text on Windows 7 / Vista. It makes it easy to render paragraphs of text that can contain different formatting, coloring, fonts etc. It supports horizontal and vertical alignments, even vertical centering of a paragraph with multiple lines which was not possible with the old text API, etc. This article will give an introduction to the new DirectWrite API.

Visual C++ 10.0's new Parallel Pattern Library supplies methods to execute multiple processing tasks, across available processing resources, eliminating the headache of manually allocating task execution.