If everything goes well, this will be the last english practice. In this practice, I am going to watch four videos about Visual C++ developing with Visual Studio.
First video talks about the use of the Visual Studio IDE. With this IDE we are able to start a new project using many different templates (for windows applications or simple console applications), a custom wizard or a blank document. When we open a new project using this IDE, it will create a directory for our program with many automatic useful files such as a "Read Me" text file, or a ".vcproj" file with many options and settings of our project. Also, there is a solution file. Opening this solution file will open our project (with all the required sub-files), so we can open this file directly instead of opening first Visual Studio. This IDE uses solution instead of projects; this is because a solution can contain different project from different platforms and languages. We have to be careful with this because we have to know the difference between closing a project and closing a solution, but thanks to this we are able to compile different projects at time.
Second video talks about avoiding and detecting memory leaks. This video is more about advanced programming, so there are some examples of how avoid memory problems; one example is when we create a pointer to an specific type of variable, we must free it, and one way to do it is, for example, using the function delete. Another way is to allocating our variables using the CallocMemory() and MallocMemory() functions, but any computer science student already know this. But one new and interesting feature of Visual Studio is the function auto_ptr, that allow us to create automatically a new pointer with one single line of code.
Third video talks about how to navigate through the C++ code base of our project. It is simply; we just need to select "Navigate To" in Edit menu and write the term that we are searching for. Another way is tu use the shortcut "Ctrl + ,". Also, we have an option to hide external objects, such as native Visual Studio functions.
Last video is about how to fix C++ coding errors without compiling. This is very simple because it works like the ortography corrector of any word processor (like MS Word). When we write something that is wrong, Visual Studio will highlight it witf a red line, and it will say us why is probably wrong what we have writted. Also, it will offer us with a "down menu" the possibilities of what we want to write.
