Damien Mulley has organised a talk by Marcio Galli, a Firefox consultant, in the National Software Centre in Mahon on the 8th of August. Sounds like it could be a very interesting talk.

Damien has the details here.

Microsoft announced Silverlight earlier this week, to general acclaim.

What’s not obvious from some of the coverage thus far, however, is that the platform demoed at Mix07 will ship in two parts: Silverlight 1.0, to be released sometime this summer; and Silverlight 1.1, to be released at some point thereafter. In the keynote (NB: Windows Media Player link), Scott Guthrie, GM of the Silverlight team, refers to this merely as “Beyond Summer 07.”

It’s the 1.1 release (given that it seems something of a quantum leap over even v1.0, they could almost refer to it as Silverlight 2.0 - and, who knows, they might do, yet) which contains the .NET Runtime support which, in turn, might (finally!) consign Javascript-as-a-general-purpose-programming-language to the dustbin of history.

If Silverlight (or something like it/better than it) takes hold, then I can imagine a time when you simply will not be able to convince a recent CS graduate of just how pointlessly difficult programming the Web once was.

To try out some of the ideas Dave and I have had, I’ve been putting together some command-line tools with Visual C++.NET 2003 SP1 and the Platform SDK.

Although these tools built without error using the IDE-provided ‘Debug’ build configuration, when I initially tried building them with the ‘Release’ configuration, the linker spat out a ream of errors along the lines of:


Tag.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "public: void __thiscall std::_String_base::_Xlen(void)const " (?_Xlen@_String_base@std@@QBEXXZ)

TaggedFile.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "public: void __thiscall std::_String_base::_Xlen(void)const " (?_Xlen@_String_base@std@@QBEXXZ)

Tagger.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "public: void __thiscall std::_String_base::_Xlen(void)const " (?_Xlen@_String_base@std@@QBEXXZ)

Main.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "class std::basic_ostream > std::wcout" (?wcout@std@@3V?$basic_ostream@_WU?$char_traits@_W@std@@@1@A)

Main.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol "public: void __thiscall std::locale::facet::_Register(void)" (?_Register@facet@locale@std@@QAEXXZ) referenced in function "class std::ctype const & __cdecl std::use_facet >(class std::locale const &)" (??$use_facet@V?$ctype@_W@std@@@std@@YAABV?$ctype@_W@0@ABVlocale@0@@Z)

Main.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol "public: class std::locale::facet const * __thiscall std::locale::_Getfacet(unsigned int)const " (?_Getfacet@locale@std@@QBEPBVfacet@12@I@Z) referenced in function "class std::ctype const & __cdecl std::use_facet >(class std::locale const &)" (??$use_facet@V?$ctype@_W@std@@@std@@YAABV?$ctype@_W@0@ABVlocale@0@@Z)

Main.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "public: static class std::locale::id std::ctype::id" (?id@?$ctype@_W@std@@2V0locale@2@A)

Main.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol __Getwctype referenced in function "protected: virtual bool __thiscall std::ctype::do_is(short,wchar_t)const " (?do_is@?$ctype@_W@std@@MBE_NF_W@Z)


A user on the Valve Developer Community wiki recommends removing references to the Platform SDK from the IDE to resolve a not dissimilar problem.

I’ve found it sufficient to remove “libcp.lib” from “\Lib” under the folder/directory into which the Platform SDK is installed; seemingly, the Platform SDK ships with a version of libcp.lib which conflicts with headers and/or libraries included in some versions of Visual C++.

If you know of a better solution or workaround, please share it in the comments.