An Tour of the STL.NET

Part of the (reasonably pleasant) distractions from posting on this blog recently has been working up the first in a series of articles on STL.NET for our Visual C++ MSDN web site. The amount of work to get from an articulation of a topic to a formal publication of it is an amazingly labor-intensive 10% -- similar to the difference between prototyping a software solution and making it deployment ready. In any case, this relatively content-free entry is just to alert you of its going on-line at

https://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/?pull=/library/en-us/dnvs05/html/stl-netprimer.asp?frame=true

If for some reason, this doesn't show up in the post as a clickable link, you can just visit the visual c++ subportion of the msdn site at

 https://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc

and hopefully find a link to it there. In any case, the Visual C++ site, under the care and breeding of Brian Johnson and Ami Vora, has really been spiffed up with some very neat content and is worth a lookie-loo.

For the article, David Clark, who did a wonderful job editing the piece, asked me to come up with a summary limited to 200. I misread that as 200 words, and wrote the following. I then discovered to my chagrin that it referred to 200 characters, including white space. I thought, well, white space is without content, so if I remove that, I get perhaps another 75 characters to play with, but that doesn't actually work … In any case, here is the summary that had to be sliced mercilessly:

For the experienced programmer, the hardest part of moving to a new development platform such as .NET is often the absence of familiar tools through which she has honed her skills and on which she depends. For the experienced C++ programmer, one such essential toolkit is the Standard Template Library (STL), and its absence under .NET until now has been a significant disappointment. With Visual C++ 2005, we fix that by providing an STL.NET library. This article, the first in a series, provides a general overview of the STL program model using STL.NET – it discusses sequential and associative containers, the generic algorithms, and the iterator abstraction that binds the two, using plenty of program examples to illustrate each point. It begins by briefly considering the alterative container models available to the .NET programmer using C++ -- the existing System::Collections library, the new System::Collections::Generic library, and, of course, STL.NET. To provide for the widest readership, this article does not require familiarity with the STL library; however, it does presume some experience with the C++ programming language.

This summary, when reduced to 200 characters, plus the white space i threw back in, ended as follows:

With Visual C++ 2005, the Standard Template Library (STL) has been re-engineered to work under the .NET Framework. This article, the first in a series, provides a general tour of STL.NET.

Talk about a poor relative. In any case, this article is culled from a text I am writing on the C++ binding to the CLI, so if you have any concerns or comments or a content wish-list, please drop me a line.