Why WTL?

When researching for a small article that lists WTL resources for Pocket PC native code develores, I found a very interesting piece of information that compares the performance of MFC and ATL (WTL builds on the ATL windowing classes): Oleg Pudeyev's MFC vs ATL. Now, the message processing performance issue is clearly explained. MFC degrades with the number of managed window handles due to its linear search method when mapping an HWND to a function pointer. With ATL's thunking mechanism this is instantaneous.

WTL rocks!

Another bug in SQL CE Console (cont.)

The comments I have just made below refer to the DesktopSqlCe assembly that supports SQL CE Console, not to the .NET classes. Thanks to Alberto Silva for pointing this out!

Another bug in SQL CE Console

I'm still banging my head on the wall. Real hard.

SQL commands (SqlCeCmd objects) may be executed either as queries (when they return a SqlCeRowset object) or as simple commands with no data returned (only status info). Interestingly, version 1.0.17 is incorrectly reporting an out of memory condition after a non-query SQL command is executed. Brilliant. So how useful is a tool like SCC when you cannot even create a table???

The version 1.0.18 is out now, with my apologies.

Diving into WTL

I finally decided to adopt WTL as my framework of choice to develop native applications. After a few years of working with MFC I got fed up with it. My first tests showed me that WTL is faster than MFC handling the GUI (the thunking mechanism makes it very fast to dispatch messages from the window procedure to the class). Also, WTL does not carry with it all the cargo I don't use in MFC, such as views and documents (they always seemed to be getting in the way, and not really helping).

Too bad we don't get all the code-generation support that eVC has for MFC, but I'm getting over it pretty fast.

MEDC UK - The aftermath

I'm a bit disappointed. Next year I'll try to attend the US event. Enough said.

On another note: London rocks!

Off to London

In a couple of hours I will leave to London to attend the MEDC UK. Cool!

Why I still use eVC3

Besides being a very stable development environment, it is still the only game in town for addressing all Pocket PC platforms. Don't just take my word for it, read what the Windows Mobile Team Blog has to say about this.

eVC3 rocks!

SQL CE Console 1.0.17 Released

I fixed some vexing bugs on the application and tried for the first time to obfuscate it. It is an interesting concept (and old, very old - remember the "C Shroud" product?) but needs some tweaking. After obfuscating your assemblies, make sure you test them thoroughly. Failing to do so may lead to some very nasty surprises. Anyway, I'm actually thinking about moving more code down to the C++ DLL and actually publishing the wrapper C# code, so obfuscation will be less of a problem.