Question

I’m currently cramming up on c++ in order to complete a specific task for my 3rd year Applied Computing degree project. Im by no means a programmer but I am going top have to program an App.

My most comfortable language is c# so this is what I will be using for the bulk of the logic in my app, however I will need to create a c++ DLL to get the values I need to work with in the app.

So, my question is, to save me having to go through everything from beggining to end in a begginners c++ book (as I am currently) what do i need to learn and what can I skip to be able to get values from ‘wlanapi’ (and by extension any other native api/library/dll) and make them available to my c# program?

As it stands I’ve been at it for a week and all i’ve covered is Declarations, Variables, Input/Output, Arithmetic Operators and am currently trudging through ‘bitwise operators’ (which I know i will never use).

edit

Ok, I’ll be specific. What would be the c++ equivalent of of querying WMI classes in c# using ManagementObjectSearcher? In particular I wish to use the WlanAPI to get the RSSI and SSID’s of multiple wireless AP’s.

Many Thanks

Answer 1

The WINAPI was originally designed for C. Because of this, you can skip over a lot of the C++ specific parts of C++.

Big stuff to skip:

• Objects
• Templates
• Anything in the STL (Standard Template Library)
  • Iterators
  • IO Streams
  • C++ Strings

Big stuff to focus on:

• Dynamic vs Static memory allocation
• Pointers
• Arrays
• C-strings
  • WINAPI provides safe alternatives for unsafe methods in <cstring>
  • WINAPI uses unicode, not ASCII.
• Structs

To be honest, there is no reason you should even be using C++. You should probably be using C for this instead.