C++ for Windows – Understanding Desktop Application Development

cdesktop applicationvisual studio 2010

I've been programming C++ for almost a year, and I've written complex programs however there are a couple of programming features of C++ which I didn't cover up (Classes & pointers), however I felt ready to develop a desktop application. I didn't get any books nor did I find any REAL documentation. I said to myself "Practicing is the most important thing in programming. I'll do that".

Obviously I didn't learn much. After 4 months of programming in Visual studio C++/CLI I barely understand what I'm doing. I know how to do very basic operations, converting data types, but I am clueless on how the program works, how I add anything except events or how I change my GUI in code and not in the GUI builder.

What should I do? Practice didn't really help, I only know some very easy things since I started working with Visual Studio, but the rest of the concepts leave me clueless. Should I hit the books, or should I just keep practicing?

Best Answer

C++/CLI is very bad and not useful, for anything except interop, and has little to do with C++.

Just to note, classes are the single most important thing in C++. If you can't use classes, you can only write tiny little toy programs.

Related Solutions

GUI Design – Syncing Options in Different Places

Multiple places to change, all places need to know the current value...sounds like the Observer Pattern.

a software design pattern in which an object, called the subject, maintains a list of its dependents, called observers, and notifies them automatically of any state changes, usually by calling one of their methods. It is mainly used to implement distributed event handling systems. The Observer pattern is also a key part in the familiar Model View Controller (MVC) architectural pattern...

C++ – How to accept arguments in the main.cpp file and reference another file

Your .cpp code files all compile into the same binary/objects, so separating files is merely a convenience for development, making code modular. After parsing the command line parameters, you may decide what calls to perform in your application.

You iterate through application arguments via the argv[] array passed to your main() entry point.

#include <iostream>

int main(int main, char* argv[])
{
        // Check the number of parameters
        if (argc < 2) {
                // Tell the user how to run the program
                std::cerr << "Usage: " << argv[0] << " NAME" << std::endl;
                /* "Usage messages" are a conventional way of telling the user
                 * how to run a program if they enter the command incorrectly.
                 */
                return 1;
        }
        // Print the user's name:
        std::cout << argv[0] << "says hello, " << argv[1] << "!" << std::endl;
        return 0;
}

As for best practices, it's best not to reinvent the wheel by using a command line parser library as answered here.