How getting started with a product born in the 199x aged about 10 may be 15 years....
I will try to focus on a general developer (avg population) who wants to find, if the tool is appropriate or how to build a sample first... So my advice will be: Just pick a sample, rebuild it and run it. Look.
Is it looking :
- professional
- confident
- strong to support the weight of time
- ready to be fully deployed or delivered on a customer desktop or server
- good to code the same kind of code
If the responses to thoses questions are an average of "oh yes, quite good, very powerfull, and, finally not so difficult to read this source code if you provide me a developer guide", then, Visual C++ is the product that will fit your need.
Ask this question : wich technology let people design and build :
- an Operating System
- a Database Engine
- a Messageing Server
- games
- a word processor, a spreadsheet, a powerfull mail client,
- a music player
- a video player
- an upper set of technology (like OLE2, COM+, and .NET...) (Be patient, I will cover the .NET world in some days :) ).
The answer to all those questions is C/C++!
The Microsoft Implementation is Microsoft Visual C++ product. Latest Version is 2005. But inside, it contains, the evolution, of all the previous versions.
More, you can download it for free !
To be fully integrated and a serious actor in the land of C/C++, developed by People like, Stroustroup, Lipman, and other AT&T folks, Microsoft made an offer to Herb Sutter to bring its ISO C++ Chairman vision phylosophy to the Visual C++ teams and, specially to the compiler team. Herb is a major contributor to a lot of invisible features that may revolution the way we write C/C++. Think about the C you have learn to write with K&R and think now about the way you can write C/C++ using new managed Extensions. Think about the way to mix STL, upper technology (.NET), low level feature, libraries (ATL/MFC) and multi-platform layers for others companies into your project. It is possible, since a long time but now it can be adcopted by a lot of people and developers. Be aware of STL.NET, it is simple and elegant. Famous !
Visual C++ can do all of this.
The IDE let people spend hours (night, day) to have a confortable environnement to have fun and sometimes, works... :)
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Do you want a Diet Coke and a Basket Ball ticket and a BaseBall Mariner's Ticket, now ?
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