Four years and still going

It has been a while since I have written here. Looking at the last time I wrote
an article of significance, I mentioned that I had insomnia. Indeed, I wrote
everything between midnight and sunrise. Fortunately for me, I haven't had
insomnia for the last year and half. This blog has suffered as a result.

So,
why am I writing now? Well, today marks my fourth year anniversary of working at
Microsoft as a full-time employee. It is a great moment for reflection,
evaluating accomplishments, and identifying missed opportunities. No doubt, going
from knowing almost nothing about C++ three-and-a-half years ago to writing the
entire specification for all the new language features in Visual C++ 2005 is
a huge accomplishment. It is such a monumental task that I wonder if it will ever
end.

This past week has been a time of nostalgia. Reviewing my experiences at
Microsoft as an intern and now, I am filled with hope and excitement. When I
worked as an intern in the Outlook team, it seemed as if so many great things
were about to happen in the software industry. Sure enough, great things are
happening... they're just taking an incredibly long time. After four years, I've
gained much more appreciation for the amount of effort it takes to change the
world. I expect to take all the lessons I learned over the past four years and
apply them to making an even greater difference in the next four.

Beyond the reminiscing, I regret not having said anything here for so long.
It is not because I have a shortage of things to discuss. To all those who asked me to write again (there are too many
to list here), I am making a commitment towards spending more of my
non-insomnia induced waking hours to sharing what I know. In no particular order, I am going to write about the following:

• Design considerations for arrays
• How to write an inline array in a ref class
• Design considerations for overriding
• Design considerations for for each
• Design considerations for tracking references (and non-const binding to
  temporaries)
• Design considerations for strings
• Design considerations for mixed types
• Design considerations for class definitions
• Comparing accessibility with visibility
• Comparing hidebyname with hidebysig rules in C++
• Design considerations for keywords
• Design considerations for initonly and literal
• Design considerations for delegates
• Design considerations for properties and events
• How to write a non-trivial event
• Design considerations for conversions
• Design considerations for safe cast and verifiability
• Design considerations for delegating constructors
• Design considerations for destructors and finalizers
• Design considerations for boxing
• Design considerations for enums
• Design considerations for attributes
• Design considerations for generics
• XML documentation comments
• Why we removed compiler switches in Visual C++ 2005
• Thoughts about IntelliSense
• Unicode support in the compiler
• Compiler support for traits
• Thoughts about reaching 100% conformance with the ISO C++ Standard
• Discussion of some of the C++ breaking changes done for conformance
• Design considerations for equality
• Design considerations for Boolean conversions
• Variadic macros
• Managed calling conventions
• How /clr:pure evolved
• __declspec(process) variables in pure
• [STAThread] and the main function
• What is <MarshalCopy> and <MarshalDestroy>?
• Design considerations for const and volatile in ref and value classes
• Thoughts about Pre-JIT compilation verses JIT compilation
• Thoughts about concurrent programming

If there are topics missing from this list or a particular topic should take
priority, please comment to let me know. To a large degree, the list above
represents subjects that I have become expert on over the last three years. With
four years past, I am looking at the challenges coming in the upcoming years.
I'm certain unexpected excitement and hard work lies ahead.

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 25, 2005
  Presumably one of the sets of compiler switches you're going to talk about is the /G5, /G6, /G7, /GB family?
• Anonymous
  July 10, 2005
  Interesting list of future topics. I'll look forward to them with pleasure :-)
• Anonymous
  July 19, 2005
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  July 19, 2005
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  June 08, 2009
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• Anonymous
  June 08, 2009
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