void main(void)

Calls, Returns and In-Between.

April 2007

How can you get the most out of your C++ experience when programming for Vista? One way is to attend "Bringing C++ to Vista: Leveraging Your C++ Code-Base to Create Native Windows Vista Applications," a one-hour Netseminar presented June 20 by Dr. Dobb's Journal and MSDN Magazine. You'll learn how to incorporate multithreading into your Vista apps, as well as how to leverage one codebase to target additional operating systems. Attendees who fill out a feedback form will be automatically entered in a drawing to win a free Slim Devices Squeezebox.

Posted by Kevin Carlson at 01:39 PM  Permalink |

Sometimes even well-understood problems can grow significantly thornier when the variables involved scale up dramatically. Take the problem of joining up the ends of line segments—the algorithm for finding the nearest point on a set of lines to a given point is a common one in modern graphical computing. But when the data sets you're working with become huge, that simple algorithm can take days to execute. Stefan Wörthmüller presents an optimized approach in "Accelerated Search For the Nearest Line."

Posted by Kevin Carlson at 10:22 AM  Permalink |

Choosing the right data structure up front can buy you dramatic performance gains, saving you long hours of optimization later on. But nothing is a silver bullet. Thomas Johnson examines STL hash containers like hash_map, hash_set, hash_multimap, and hash_multiset, which are to be included in TR1 in the form of unordered_map, unordered_multimap, unordered_set, and unordered_multiset, in his article "C++ STL Hash Containers and Performance."

Posted by Kevin Carlson at 12:56 PM  Permalink |

If you're looking for a way to leverage your C knowledge and experience to write for the S60 smartphone, Open C might be just the ticket. Open C is a set of C libraries built on POSIX that can enable you to write much more portable code, and can help you get around a lack of Symbian Experience. Eero Penttinen and Antti Saukko introduce this new C variant in "Open C: Paving the Way for Porting."

Posted by Kevin Carlson at 02:18 PM  Permalink |