| It is with great satisfaction that I introduce you to Stephen’s excellent new book, Pro Visual C++/CLI
and the .NET 2.0 Platform, the first detailed treatment of what has been standardized under ECMA as
C++/CLI. Of course, any text, no matter how excellent, is itself incomplete, like a three-walled room.
The fourth wall, in this case, is you, the reader. You complete the text by exercising the code samples,
poking around with them, and finally writing your own code. That’s really the only way to develop a
deep understanding of this stuff. But having an experienced guide to step you through the hazards of
any new language is priceless, and this is what Stephen’s text accomplishes. I cannot recommend it
too highly.
With Stephen’s indulgence, I would like to give you a short overview of the ideas behind the
language’s original design and place it in the context of the design and evolution of C++ itself. The
first question people ask is, “So what is C++/CLI?”
C++/CLI is a self-contained, component-based dynamic programming language that, like C#
or Java, is derived from C++. Unlike those languages, however, we have worked hard to integrate
C++/CLI into ISO-C++, using the historical model of evolving the C/C++ programming language to
support modern programming paradigms. Historically, one can say that C++/CLI is to C++ as C++ is
to C. |
