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Visual C++

psa.exe partial tree sample

Process Status Analysis – the first steps

I am pleased to announce my first cross-platform and open source project, the Process Status Analysis tool, available on GitHub.

The Process Status Analysis (psa) is a command line tool that offer some Operating System processes analysis features:
– Get all processes loaded in memory information
– Get process only used memory
– Print processes tree
– Top most “expensive” processes
– Redirect output to a file

Getting Table’s indexes experiences – workaround

Trying to get table indexes information in SQL Server 2012 I identified a strange situation within a specific method that I was using so long but it was not acting as expected in one situation.

Usually, I got the right information about indexes but in one situation I encounter a strange behavior. It’s about having a clustered index into a scenario.

I have a table that contains two indexes referenced to some fields: IndexField_1 and IndexField_3 mapped over int, NULL fields. When IndexField_1 is Non-Unique, Non-Clustered and IndexField_3 is Clustered index I get the right information.
But if the index IndexField_1 is Clustered and the IndexField_3 is Non-Unique, Non-Clustered I get no information about IndexField_1 index (eg. szIdxName and szIdxColName are “” and their length is -1 that means SQL_NULL_DATA). Within while loop, with the next iteration I get correct information about the second index IndexField_3.

Adventures with _chkstk

Called by the compiler when you have more than one page of local variables in your function.
_chkstk Routine is a helper routine for the C compiler. For x86 compilers, _chkstk Routine is called when the local variables exceed 4K bytes; for x64 compilers it is 8K.

That’s all that you get from _chkstk()’s msdn web page. Nothing more…

pre vs. post increment operator – benchmark

A recent Visual C++ team’s comment on twitter.com reminded me a hot topic that exists in C++ programming world: there is a long discussion of using pre versus post increment operators, specially, for iterators. Even me I was witness to a discussion like this. The discussion started from a FAQ written by me on www.codexpert.ro.

Base on that VC++ team’s tweet related to viva64.com’s research I decided to create my own benchmark base on single and multicore architectures. For those that don’t know Viva64 is a company specialized on Static Code Analysis.
Starting from their project I extended the tested for other STL containers: std::vector, std::list, std::map, and std::unordered_map (VC++ 2010 hash table implementation).
For parallel core tests I used Microsoft’s new technology called Parallel Pattern Library.
continue…

Flexible changes for product version properties – Visual C++ binaries

Manually editing of binaries version in the resource editor of Visual Studio IDE is not a viable solution. If we have dozens of projects in our solution, then for each kit building we should need manual resources file edit. Otherwise, we can use a special tool that does this thing for us.
Unfortunately this approach is not the most flexible and could fail.

For our flexible binaries properties changes and in order to avoid manual edit for each rebuild we can create and include a header file (version.h) that contains some constants of product version and file version of our project (.rc files).

We have to include only these constants into this file (version.h):
#define PRODUCT_VERSION 4.3.2.198
#define PRODUCT_VERSION_STR “4.3.2.198”

Then, for each .rc file wherever we have FileVersion and ProductVersion we have to use this constants.
When we will build a new kit, we have to change only these constants and then to start the kit building process. Everything is fine until we add new controls in our projects resource files. Then, because of Visual Studio IDE automation we can get an unlikely surprise: the FileVersion and the ProductVersion properties could be reset to 1.0.0.0.

In order to avoid this issue and edit the version only in a single place I propose the following workaround.

File size fast detection

Many times in our job, we need to work with files and need to know file properties.
One of the most important properties is file size. Of course, there are a lot of API that allows finding this property, but most of them needs additional file operations: open file, find file size and close file.

continue…

Dynamic popup and drop down menus for custom representations

Many applications allow dynamic customization for visual objects or data views. For instance, well known Internet Explorer application provides toolbars customization using a popup menu that appears when the user execute right click mouse action in toolbar zone area.

Internet Explorer sample menu

Other sample where this kind of menu is very useful is when it’s used in order to customize database data representation in Windows controls like List control or grid control. These kind of applications allow data filtering and show/hide columns using this kind of menu. The user just right click on control header and gets what he need.

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Versionable Object’s Serialization in MDI applications

This article represents a follow-up of the last article, “Versionable Object’s Serialization using MFC in non Document View applications”. In that article I presented to you a way to solve incompatibility issues between different file versions of the same application, based on MFC serialization into a dialog base application.
But, the dialog base applications are not the best way to use and apply MFC serialization.
Applications base on document view architecture (MDI or SDI) are the best solution when we want to develop MFC application with serialization support.
Document View MFC architecture offers support for automatic save and load document to/from a file on a storage area, using a serialization mechanism. MDI (Multiple Document Interface) and SDI (Single Document Interface) application offers default serialization basic mechanism.

SerAddressBookMDI Main Window - continue to article

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Versionable Object’s Serialization using MFC in non Document View applications

Most existing applications operate with data that must be stored and loaded in different times and different locations. The data is stored in text or binary files with a well defined format.
The Problem
Initially, in the first version 1.0, an application operates with data structures that can be stored and loaded. But, next version (2.0) these data structures suffers changes. Some structure’s attributes are added and other could be removed. These things change files format and structure when a new file version is saved.
Question: What happens when you are using an application version 2.0 and you are trying to load old files format (version 1.0)?
Answer: Most cases should cause incompatibility troubles between the current new application and files in old format. This could throw exceptions and the application could have undefined behavior.
That’s why the application must be written in order to be able to open both file versions.
Solution
In order to solve the compatibility issue exist many solutions, more or less professional. The recommended solution is the serialization.
Application window

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