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Why is there no easy way to rename a project from within Visual Studio ? I just noticed I named a small experiment “FeaderFiles” instead of “HeaderFiles”. Not really a problem this time but annoying.

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As promised here is the tiny bit of C++ code that pops up a Windows dialogue box  from a console App.

#include “pch.h”

#include <iostream>

#include <Windows.h>

int main()

{

int msgboxID = MessageBoxA(NULL, “Hello World”, “My Box”, 0);

return msgboxID;

}

If you paste this into Visual Studio it will compile and run as long as you have a fairly recent version of the Windows SDK installed.

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Nop you dont see it oh well

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They will happily take your money if you pop over for a holiday but remember they are taking money.

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I will say again. Why do you like them ? They hate you and me.

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Why do you want the EU them ? Why why why ? What for ? You think they know better than the UK people. You dont think they are out to rob us blind ?  They ARE.

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Yep it looks like they are going to be able to stick a finger up to our leave vote.

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Perhaps they will but I dont see it myself. I REALLY want to stick two fingers up at THEIR common fishing policy and THEIR comnon farming policy and THEIR customs union. Really Really up theirs.

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I sense another Oh come on moment here ?. C4 neutral ? They have a legal requirement in their charter to be perverse dont they ? And the Universities of Birmingham, Durham and Newcastle ? I dont know why they are totally against Brexit but everything they come out with says they are. Could be an EU grant thing ?

The EU can have any border arangements it likes if it wants to. Look at the swiss or for that matter any other country the EU borders.

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Dear Ed. Oh come on you must have spotted I was just being deliberately annoying ? But as you took the bait if we are not going to put up a hard border with N Ireland and the EU wont either then who will ? Ireland ? Cant see it myself.

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Yes indeed I am lazy given the chance ? let someone else write a public domain function and I will use it ! That includes all the functions Microsoft makes avaliable. Include Windows.h at the start of your code and you can call most of them. I will put up a very simple bit of C that displays a “Hello world” dialogue box when I come off the beer tomorrow (It is friday night ?) A real windows box from a console app.

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Oh yes the BASIC USR function will push the program counter on to the stack followed by your arguments followed by the number of arguments you passed. Your routine must pull the arguments and the number of arguements off the stack before returning with an RTS instruction or you will return to a nonsence address.

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Here is a thing i did not expect. The more I look into C functions the more I understand functions in Atari BASIC. For instance FRE(0) will return the amount of free user memory avaliable to BASIC and RND(0) will get you a random number. Both are functions and require an input variable. In this case it is 0 and is the same as null. I did not know why I had to send something before.

Another thing is C is strongly typed and so is Atari BASIC. You can have a simple variable that you must declare and assign at the same time with something like A=10. A will get 8 bytes in memory and it will be of type signed floating point. You can also have an array but it must be dimentioned first with something like DIM A(10). That will get you an array with ten 8 byte elements. Or you can have a matrix with DIM (10,10).

String variables are the last type you can have and they must be dimentioned too with DIM A$(10) or such like. That will get you 10 bytes of memory asigned as ATASCII (Atari ASCII) charachters. If you want to know the memory location of a string then you can use x=ADR(A$). This is handy for short machine code functions. A=USR(ADR(A$), argument, argument, etc). Put your routine in the string and BASIC will use it as a pointer. If you are going to return a value to A then there are 2 bytes in page 3 of memory to store your value.

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All going a bit flat on the negotiation front. I do wish Mrs May would get on with her great surrender so I can have have something to be outraged about ?

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I may have mentioned this before but I flew back to Heathrow from Thailand in 2003 and was surprised to find a UK passports only que at immigration. Our que had 5 people in it and the all other passports que had a jumbo jets worth. The man in front of me presented and EU passport and was told ” Yes you have the same right of entry as someone with a UK passport but this que is for UK passports only so you must join the other que”. Nearly laughed my head off.

The other thing I noticed was the number of people in the all other que clutching EU passports. What were these peoples travel plans ?

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Can be sky blue pink for all I care as long as they take all reference to the EU off it.

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In case you were wondering “cout<<” is a newer alternative to “printf” using an output stream. Corse I may be teaching granny to suck eggs here ?

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I am extending my knowlage of C into C++. I must admit that I am a bit rusty with C so it is a good thing that the course covers the common basics before moving on to C++ specifics like classes.

I completed the introduction to C++ course in less than a week (with a 100% score I might add ?) and Im now part way through the intermediate course.

I don’t always use perfect syntax here but the code example I posted will compile and run in Visual Studio as I pasted it from there.

When I get in I will load up the code and step through it with Auto variable display turned on. I will see what the value of Avariable is when I just step into a function without executing any of its instructions.

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Its in the question. The first one asks for a value on RETURN from a function. The second one asks for the value on CALLING a function, no mention is made of executing the function let alone returning from it. An earlier exercise asked us output the value of a pointer that we passed to a function straight after the function was called and before it returned so I answered question 2 as it was writtern after reading it twice. Just making sure im not being dumb before I raise the point on the edX forum ?

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We are getting into the realms of using Process Monitor from Sysinternals here. This would involve delving through a large log file with filters and looking at stack traces. If you want to give it a go then I can give you some pointers or I may even be talked into looking through a copy of the log myself ?

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