A simple GPS viewer

Here's a simple GPS viewer application. I wrote it to help me in testing the transition to reference counted pointers in my budding Windows Mobile native (WTL-based) framework. In the process I have learned a few things about reference counted pointers, especially when NOT to use them.

One of the changes I made to the way the CPropertyListView class is used is that it contains pointers to items created on the heap and not on the stack. This means that you now have to create items like this:

m_pGpsFix = new CPropertyString(L"Fix", L"Unknown");

Note that the m_pGpsFix variable is actually a "smart pointer" and you don't have to worry about deleting it in the destructor. Nor does the list, in fact... When each item's reference count reaches zero, the last smart pointer that references the object will delete it (and that's why you cannot have stack allocated items). This is when you should use smart pointers, so when should you use simple C++ pointers? I found out the hard way when adding these items to the list. My original (and right) prototype was:

void CTouchListBase::AddItem(CTouchListItem* pItem)

When I replaced the C++ pointer with a smart one, I immediately lost one of the best features these things have: the ability of a base class pointer to refer to a derived class object. Understanding that I don't know enough about C++ class templates to make this work (not even sure if that's possible - will have to look at Jossutti's book), I decided to fall back to straight C++ pointers. This poses no problem because the method internally will use the smart pointer class constructor to build a new instance using the raw pointer and add it to the underlying array, so the reference counting is respected.

The sample application just starts the GPSID and displays some data from the GPS on a dialog. As you can see from the ZIP file, there are two additional library projects that make up the framework. Note that these are subject to change and do have bugs!

Sample code: GpsView.zip (93 KB)