axel's dev corner

Once I had to set up a new development machine with Visual Studio 2005, I suddenly missed my Ref++ installation. Ok, nothing easier than downloading it ... so I thought. And was shocked to find that the refpp.com site has been abandonded! I actually had to use archive.org to get the latest Ref++ installation files. Thank you, archive.org!

However, there seems to be something going wrong in the C++ community. Searching for the story behind Ideat Solutions disapperance, I found very little sites mentioning Ref++ at all. Pretty sad for a tool bringing Refatoring to the C++ community since VS2003 at very reasonable rates! Granted, C++ refactoring is technoically more difficult and may not work in every case. But it is very much possible and existing for most C++ code.

As we can finally abandon the decades-old inconsistent codebase of the MFC days with the ASP.NET libraries, one should think that other benefits from the Java world sould travel to the C++ community as well. For example, real OOP style using Design Patterns and .. Refactoring. Both concepts have revolutionized programming years ago, and I think its high time the windows development community becomes fully aware of them. If your code is not relying on third party libraries or especially incompartible, there is no excuse for using a 10-year old IDE along with even older programming habits.

Since managed C++ is not exactly elegant, and the maintinance of .cpp and .h files, among other things, makes my C++ writing somewhat solwer, I personally prefer C# and System.Windows.Forms for medium sized new projects over C++. When it has to be C++, I compile a managed dll and use C# for the GUI.

For those projects where I have to use my older VS6 code, I went through the not always easy process of porting to VS2005 (still using MFC), giving me the benefit of a working class browser supporting templates and namespaces, subversion integration through AnkhSVN and ... useable refactoring thanks to Ideat Solutions marvelous Ref++.