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Going on 10 hours setting up a project with Active X

If you asked me, or any other game programmer, to setup a game project with multiple static libraries divided by component it would take half an hour at at most. If you had asked me, or any other game programmer that I know of, to do the same thing with ONE Active X / MFC […]

If you asked me, or any other game programmer, to setup a game project with multiple static libraries divided by component it would take half an hour at at most.

If you had asked me, or any other game programmer that I know of, to do the same thing with ONE Active X / MFC project… well I just finished and it took 10 hours.

The MFC project is like a virus, or a tumor, in the body of the solution. Simply renaming a file can cause a link error. Then you change it back and get some other link error you’ve never seen before. At one point I was trying to change the output directory of the ocx, which somehow caused it to no longer link and the exe launcher to stop running due to some resource conflict. I had to create an entirely new Active X project, copy over all the relevant settings, remake some of the files, and import it into the solution. Although it was identical to the old project it now worked where the other one didn’t.

I’ve gotten into the habit after EVERY change, no matter how meaningless (such as adding a ‘d’ to the end of the output filename in debug), to recompile everything in both debug and release and run it to make sure nothing broke. Sound pointless? I didn’t do it the first 8 hours and I did do it the last 2. That’s the only reason it only wound up taking 10 hours instead of 20 or 30. Of course the few times everything actually runs I also zip it up and keep a backup so I can revert the entire solution, which I had to do several times.

There are so many little annoyances and time wasters. For example, if you make a temporary project, build it, and delete it your registry now has junk in it. The Active X Control Test container has an unregister button but it only works if you still have the same project on your harddrive using the same GUID. It asks you if you want to wipe out the registry keys, but that never works. So every so often I have to manually edit and clean out the registry just because I’m creating test projects in Active X.

Active X Registry Cleaning

Anyway, it seems like I finally got things running:

First working solution

Perforce is being a pain in the ass but I can’t blame it since few people have to delete, create, move, and rename projects as much as I have in the last 10 hours. So I’m just going to wipe the database and upload what I have.

2 replies on “Going on 10 hours setting up a project with Active X”

The thing about Linux is that it is predictable and straightforward. If you write it correctly it works. It won’t randomly stop working, even when you change back to the previous settings. There is no insane registry to deal with. You don’t have to worry about parts of one project affecting another project.

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