SteveX Compiled

I’ve started experimenting with Managed C++ again. I never really considered it a serious tool because generally I like the C# language better, and my previous experiments with trying to take an existing C++ app and turn it into a Managed C++ app have been painful and generally fruitless.

But somewhere at the PDC, I saw something (vague huh) that said you could make just part of a C++ application managed. So I loaded up a large MFC app, selected a single random file in the middle of it and turned on the /clr switch. I also had to turn off /ZI (reduced it to /Zi), and turn off the runtime checks, but once that was done, it compiled, linked, and still ran.

Next test was to add a call to some managed code into my C++ and that worked perfectly as well.

This is great for consuming .NET objects from C++ since you can just use them without having to do any tricks at all… but I’m starting to see that trying to mix C++ and Managed C++ in the same application is not going to be easy.

One of the problems is that even though I can put a C++ object in a .cpp file, I can’t expose that object via a header file, since the syntax required would be illegal in standard C++. The Managed C++ object would only be accessible if you wrapped it in some standard C++ object and the rest of the code used that instead.

Another problem is that reflection doesn’t work the way it does for a completely managed app. You can’t really reflect against a mixed binary – Assembly.Load barfs trying to load it. This is too bad, since if it worked, you’d be able to write unit tests to test an unmanaged C++ application in Managed C++ and then use NUnit or something like it to run the tests. NUnit depends on reflection to find tests, so it won’t work in this case.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 30th, 2005 at 7:47 am and is filed under .NET. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.