Eric Gunnerson
has a couple of interesting posts (first,
second) about C++ versus C#. I develop almost exclusively in C# these days,
and I LOVE it. Years ago, C++ was a must for development on the
job at CADTEL - mainly
doing simple Windows API and programming against the AutoCAD API uisng Visual
C++ (NOTE: this in 1995. Nowadays, there is even
a .NET AutoCAD API so you can use C# for that today as well!). Since I left
CADTEL in 1997, I've also written some Win32 DLLs in VC++ for
creating custom Webbots in an older version of FrontPage, wrote a few ISAPI
filters, and played around with ATL, and
binary DHTML behaviors (which
you can also create in VB). Although everyone knows that you can do just
about anything with Visual C++, I found it to be very complicated for windows
programming. My motto in the 90s was, "if I can't do it with VB, I'll use Visual
C++." Fortunately, I pursued Web (ASP) development for the most part and all of
object libraries I had to write for use in MTS/COM+ could be written in VB.
That being said, let me list based on my limited experience as a VC++ developer,
what I agree with in the guru's (Eric Gunnerson) blog posts:
- The "Code == Component" section. I hated dealing with IDL and importing
from type libraries. Enough said.
- Language Complexity - VC++ is much more difficult to work with.
- Events - my VC++ experience with events was based on creating Windows
apps with MFC and the class wizard did all of the work for me, so I can't
bash C++ here...but events are really useful in the work I do with C#.
- Strings - this is huge. C++ has CString, LPCTSTR, LPTSTR, WCHAR*, TCHAR*,
BSTR , _T - yuck!
Nowadays, my new motto is: "If I can't do it in C#, I'll use VC++." Heck, I'm
even interested in learning how to write managed gaming applications, so I just
ordered
Beginning .NET Game Programming in C# by David Weller. I'll post a review
when I'm finished with that book. :-)
