I’ve been working on an MFC project which embeds a basic web-browser component in a dialog. It does this using a Microsoft Web Browser ActiveX component. The control should hook into whatever versi...

I was dealing with a subtle issue recently involving setting access permissions on Windows using NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System). It turned out that the problem was not with NSIS at all. ...

A serial-to-parallel shift register (or SIPO: Serial In Parallel Out) lets you take a series of signals on one output and split them up into several separate outputs in parallel. For example, if yo...

When you’re dealing with a large program and multiple developers, it’s not always obvious how and when certain things get executed. One of the very useful ways to debug unexpected behaviour is to s...

If you’re a programmer, you’ll hopefully be familiar with the difference between making a copy of an object and making a reference (or a pointer) to it. The former duplicates the data, resulting in...

The C++11 standard introduced the auto keyword for type deduction. One of its main uses is to make variable declarations more concise. It can also improve the maintainability of code if used correc...

When you’re dealing with an intensive real-time application, such as a game or simulation, a common problem is that debug builds in C++ can run much slower than release builds. This difference in r...

There are times when it’s extremely useful to be able to pass some data between different programs running on the same system. For example, you might have multiple programs forming part of the same...

I’m in the process of writing up my doctoral thesis, and have had to wrestle with a lot of Word formatting. The biggest difficulty I had was separating the whole document into chapters. I wanted ea...

As I’ve mentioned on some recent posts, I’ve been working on developing my own compiler and virtual machine lately. And finally, it lives! It’s taken 5 months, with some language revisions along th...