In this section I will collect short things that have taken me some time to figure out. The intent is that I would be able to avoid wasting time in the future after I have forgotten about them.
24.10.2012
Things you want to do:
Get the color theme editor and change the theme to Blue. This gets the colors closer to the way they were in Visual Studio 2010.
If it does not exist already, create a registry-entry named
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\General\SuppressUppercaseConversion
with `REG_DWORD` value 1. This gets rid of all-uppercase menus.
19.06.2012
In Visual Studio 2010, the preferred way to disable
iterator checking is to define _ITERATOR_DEBUG_LEVEL = 0.
The _ITERATOR_DEBUG_LEVEL replaces the different
combinations of _SECURE_SCL and _HAS_ITERATOR_DEBUGGING.
See here for more information.
18.06.2012
Property sheets are a nice way to set up properties to projects. Each property sheet is a collection of properties for a project. One can attach arbitrarily many property sheets to each project, and the property sheets can be shared between projects. The latter feature is the essential one.
In my solutions at least, the projects share very similar properties. Now I can create just one property sheet for the whole solution and apply that to each project. If I want to change the properties, I will do so in the property sheet.
What’s more, multiple property sheets can be layered so that the union of their properties applies. The sheets are given an order. If two sheets define the same property, then the later one takes priority.
The strategy is to give each solution a property sheet in which to configure output directories, disable warnings, and disable secure-stl etc. You will then make this property sheet part of your solution, in the sense of carrying it around in the version control.
There are also special global property sheets called
Microsoft.Cpp.Win32.user and Microsoft.Cpp.Win64.user
which are automatically added to each configuration of
each project. These will apply properties globally on your
computer. If you change to another computer, these settings
are lost. These property sheets are ideal for specifying
include and library directories for external libraries
(which are of course computer-specific). While the former
works on 32-bit builds, the latter works on 64-bit builds.
Of course, you will want to choose different directories
for them.
A bit odd feature of the property sheets is that they won’t get save automatically when you change a property. You must either Save All, or right click on the property sheet and save it. This is unintuitive and causes unnecessary confusion from time to time.
It is useful to notice that a property sheet can be added to all projects and configuration at the same time. Simply select the desired projects or configurations and right click to add an existing property sheet. Unfortunately, it seems a given property sheet can not be removed from all projects at once.
If you need to set project-specific properties, do note that
you must explicitly bring in the inherited properties.
For example, in the Preprocessor definitions property,
this is done by %(PreprocessorDefinitions).
There is a trap in the command-line settings. If you specify
Additional Options in a project, then those will not be
unioned with the additional options in the property sheets.
Unless I am mistaken, it is missing a way to bring in the
inherited options. Therefore, you should use the other options
explicitly instead. For example, if you need a preprocessor
definition, do it in the Preprocessor definitions property
instead of as a /D switch in Additional Options.
18.06.2012
In Gnu Flex, we would like the scanner not to include the unistd.h
file because it is not a standard file and does not exist on Windows.
Later versions of Flex have the %option nounistd. Unfortunately
the latest Flex version that can be found for Windows is 2.5.4
and it does not have this option. It is sufficient to create an
empty unistd.h file. However, creating the file in the current
directory will not do, because it is included as <unistd.h>,
that is, the current directory will not be searched.
It has to be placed somewhere on the include search path of the
compiler.
The lexer can be generated by:
flex -olex_console_scanner.cpp console_scanner.l
In Visual Studio, you can make this automatic as a custom
build step. Right click on console_scanner.l, click on
Properties, and give the above as a custom build command.
Interestingly, the above does not work if the -o option
is on the right side. Also note that it is essential to
change the name of the output file to .cpp. Otherwise flex
will output a .c file, which will be compiled as C code by
Visual Studio. This will give errors since the code is
actually C++.
17.06.2012
While pushing changes in TortoiseHG, it said that
SSL: Server certificate verify failed. The problem
is that the certificate in the server is self-signed.
Two ways to fix this:
[web]
cacerts=
No host validation.16.06.2012
After adding the x64 platform to the project in Visual Studio 2010 SP1,
the property sheet Microsoft.cpp.x64.user was not created for the
projects. This was resolved by restarting the Visual Studio.