Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
I have an application written in native C++ which I’d like to get running on the .NET virtual machine. I was thinking of recompiling the C++ code as C++/CLI, using the Visual Studio 2008 compiler. Regrettably, I don’t find any documentation on how to do this, so hence my questions:
A lot of native C++ code will actually just compile and run on C++/CLI. This is really a kind of hybrid compiler that can call native Win32 functions and use standard C libraries like OpenGL. You can even call COM interfaces directly (all the stuff you can do with a native C++ compiler).
The .Net library is also available but for these you create managed classes (using the ref class keyword). You will use gcnew to allocate memory for these classes (from a garbage collected heap). Memory for your normal classes is still allocated using new and delete (from a standard, non garbage-collected heap).
In short, you can migrate to .Net in bits and pieces, though there is still some friction when switching between managed and unmanaged classes.
I found this book useful: Pro Visual C++/CLI.