Do you know the warm feeling when your (software) baby really starts to help people in the outside world ? For university guys, this is an unusual feeling. Thanks to Martin v. Loewis, my VsExtComp project helps in building 64bit versions of Python. It allows you to use external compilers with your exiting Visual Studio 2003 projects. The need for the plugin arised from the fact that NMake file converters where not powerful enough. Meanwhile, NAnt might also solve this issue.
Archive for April, 2006
Windows gets symbolic links
April 23rd, 2006 by PeterAfter only 18 years of development, Windows NT (Vista) now gets symbolic links.
One could argue that symbolic links are available since the very first version of the POSIX subsystem (== Services for Unix == Interix). This is true, as well as the fact that NTFS has the according concept (reparse points, junction points) also for a very long time now. But, what we now get is support for symbolic links in WIN32 world – and due to the usage of MFC or Win32 file open/save dialogs, this should be automatically available for all serious WIN32 applications.
Until now, there seems no support in WIN32_FIND_DATA and WIN32_FILE_ATTRIBUTE_DATA, so something like lstat and readlink is still pending.
News Flash
April 11th, 2006 by PeterFeeling uncomfortable with Google News and friends ? I really like this (german) article, which shows the current situation with automated news composition. BTW, I found it through a Google AdWord commercial on the same site 
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Error C2143: syntax error : missing ‘;’ before ‘type’
April 5th, 2006 by PeterToday, this one happened to me with the Condor DRMAA library for Windows, both in VC6 and VC8.
I learned that inline definitions are not “pure C”, therefore only C99 compilers can live with such a construct. GCC has no problem with this, but the MS compilers are still not fully C99 compliant.
For the VC8 SDK compiler, you usually also want to get rid of the “deprecated for security” messages regarding some unusual C functions (e.g. strcpy). This helps:
[source:c]
#pragma warning (disable: 4996)
#define _CRT_SECURE_NO_DEPRECATE
[/source]