Essential Guide to Managed Extensions for C++

• Features how to write .NET applications using C++, and how to mix unmanaged and managed C++ code in the same application
• Details when and why to use unmanaged code in .NET developments
• Includes code samples with detailed explanations in every chapter

The Essential Guide to Managed Extensions for C++ is a comprehensive guide for programmers writing code in Managed Extensions for C++ (MC++). The information in this book comes straight from the horse's mouth&emdash;both authors have been key members of the Visual C++ .NET compiler development team and have spent most of their time implementing the language and educating others about managed C++.

The book is divided into two parts. Part One covers the basics of MC++. It starts with an introduction to MC++, and gives a brief overview of the .NET Framework. Next, it delves directly into the various features of MC++, including managed classes, interfaces, value types, properties, enumerations, pointers, arrays, operators, delegates, attributes, events, and exceptions.

Part Two of the book is devoted to the transition between the managed and unmanaged worlds. It starts with a general introduction to interoperability between managed and unmanaged code. The following chapters describe the Platform Invoke service, interoperability between COM and .NET, and various data marshaling techniques. The last chapter of Part Two shows how MC++ can be used to write interoperability layers over existing components with minimal overhead.

This is the book about general-purpose software development with MC++ (C++ with managed extension). It will not tell you how to write .NET windowing or data access code, but it describes general principles and ideas helping write better code for .NET with MC++.

The book starts with simple MC++ constructs and finishes with mastering managed/native interop questions. Throughout the book, MC++ elements are compared with standard C++ equivalents. I don't think it was necessary, because the book is intended for skilled C++ developers who can easily see parallels themselves. However, knowing some differences was very important and interesting for me. Still in some places the author tends to advertise MC++ using some (unfair in my opinion) comparisons between standard C++ and MC++.

One shouldn't expect to know everything about MC++ after reading the book. A lot of experimentation is required to fully understand the power of MC++ over other languages targeting .NET. I think that the author could do a better job describing some effective techniques (available in the public domain, see [web page name]for example) that would have made the book a more exciting reading.

I recommend this book as a first step on the way of exploration MC++ capabilities.


Not much beef   June 2, 2002
 13 out of 17 found this review helpful

This book does not contain any more than the managed extensions specification document that ships with Visual Studio.net. It covers the most straight forward concepts with most straight forward and trivial examples.
I would have liked to see tougher topics covered like how to do callbacks from managed to unmanaged C++. Also more samples on interop between C#, MC++ and native C++.