I've been spending most of my time this week back in the unmanaged world, writing C++ code again in good old Visual C++ 6.0. To make it even more fun, this was OLE DB with ATL. To be honest, took me a couple of hours to get the hang of it again, but after that my C++ started to come back more easily.

I did finally remember one of the reasons I moved off C++ to the managed code: Strings. Man, dealing with strings in C++ is just painful, even with CString, CComBSTR, _bstr_t, std:string and std:wstring at your disposal. Or maybe, that's just another reason it can be a pain in the neck. Anyway, if you find yourself writing OLE DB code again, the RowsetViewer tool in the MDAC SDK is a godsend .

One thing that I can say in favor of Visual C++ 6.0: The thing is freaking fast compared to Visual Studio 2005. However, I didn't remember there was no obvious way to change the font and font size, so using VC++ 6.0 on a hi-res screen isn't a particularly nice experience.

Visual Studio, Visual C++, ATL, OLE DB