Practical C++
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Beginning C++ 3, Setting up your Development Tree
Posted on April 19th, 2009 No commentsSetting up your Development Tree
Your development tree is basically the directory structure that holds your source code, it can be as big and as elaborate as you like however it should have only one root.
Before you rush in and start programming, it’s a good idea to think about where your development tree should be. I believe it is best to put your development tree in a user readable/writable part of your directory hierarchy. The most obvious place to put it, is under the “My Documents” folder for your user. If you put it anywhere else, you need to remember you will need to adjust the permissions of the tree so that all the users who need to use it have access.
The form your development tree should take is a vast topic, with many variations possible. Here are a few simple guidelines to follow while working on your development tree.
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Beginning C++ 2, Creating the Build Environment
Posted on April 18th, 2009 No commentsCreating the Build Environment
In this article I’ll describe how to setup the Visual C++ 2008 build environment on the Windows platform.
Windows Platforms and the SDK
The simplest Windows build environment consists of just the operating system and the freely downloadable platform SDK. The platform SDK consists of all the header files, library files, debug files (pdbs) that are needed to develop applications on Windows. It also comes with the compilers and linkers needed to compile any of C++ or C# programs you might create. However it lacks a User Interface for development so you would have to do all your development with the command prompt and a text editor.An alternative free windows platform is to use Visual Studio C++ Express Edition. This package includes a slightly older version of the platform SDK but it has the excellent Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE) packaged in with it.
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Beginning C++ 1, Setting up the Platform
Posted on April 16th, 2009 No commentsSetting up the Platform
In this article I’ll be covering the prerequisites for setting up windows to be developer friendly
As you probably already know, you can build C++ programs on many, many platforms. The one I’ll be concentrating on here will be the Microsoft Windows platform (Windows XP upwards) using the Visual C++ 2008 compiler and the Boost library build environment
It’s debatable where the platform ends and the build environment begins. Traditionally the platform is a combination of the operating system and the hardware architecture. The build environment is the combination of the compiler and various libraries. The compiler and the libraries you use can have a significant effect on the nature of the language and your code. I’ll expand more on this in later articles.