I guess the credit roll for this one is:
Pikachu as the Rager
Hildreth as “Oh my god I got less points than Harry”
Harry Gomm as “Recording the video”
And other random people

Enjoy

Go go gadget harry

Just had one of the best presentations so far at “Hogeschool Utrecht” where they put a lot of effort in to game development and teaching through game development. I’m always very happy to see interest in game development, especially for teaching purposes. Personally I’ve created some materials for Microsoft in the Netherlands believing strongly in the power of XNA and teaching proper programming. Now in my eyes proper software development -in general- is done by thinking first, then thinking again, designing and then building. With game development if you don’t think things through properly you’ll end up with a beaten up project.

So back on topic: It was a great presentation with a great audience who were genuinely interested in the subject matter. I was able to present along side Rob Miles of whom’s XNA presentations I’ve always been a big fan, and Mark Overmars who is one of the professors teaching at the University.  Please make sure you take a gander at the GATE project he’s heading doing some interesting research there.

I even got to do my say ‘on tape’ so I wonder when that stuff comes and pops up all over the net. It’s totally lame my whole ‘text’ though, I’m not that great on camera and it shows! Anyway thank you Hogeschool van Utrecht for hosting the event and Microsoft for inviting me as a speaker. The slides can be found here.

Now you may ask: why would you want to do something silly like that? Didn’t you always say that you could do anything in C# that can be done in C++ as well? The answer is: yes, I did, and I still believe that (obviously low-level driver work forms a bit of an exception here), however I just want to get in to the stuff I’ve recently learned about C++ that made me take a new interest in the language. That of course beside my  reverse engineering exploits, where using C++ to do code injection etc. would help greatly. The revelations that made me take this step was an interesting talk held by Tarek Madkour) program manager of Microsoft’s C++ IDE team. Apparently there’s work being done on a new version (standardized version) of C++ called C++ 0x. There’s quite a bit that you could read about this new form of C++ at the Microsoft Visual C++ team blog. I was pleasantly surprised by C++ and how they were trying to make it quite a bit better and much easier to perform some of the common tasks. For example the use of excessive copying with string operations, or the addition of null pointers (hurray).

So what I’m wanting to do is set up a series of posts  around my experiences as someone coming from mostly managed code (C++ was borland C++ builder AND it was over 10 years ago), to something unmanaged. I’ll explain the things that I run in to from a managed perspective and try and make this a little guide for those who are experienced programmers with some years of experience doing either C# or Java and want to get (back) in to C++. Also note that I’ll definitely will be sticking with Microsoft VC++ 0x, but from what I understand most (if not all) C++ stuff in there (syntax etc.) will be standardized. I’ll just be using the Windows (7) libs/headers etc. where applicable. So not much of a guide for the *nix people (sorry guys )