An uninitialized pointer has an indeterminate value. It’s almost impossible to test subsequently whether such a pointer is valid, especially if it is passed as an argument to a function,

When creating menu items and adding them to a menu, you can shorten your code by combining two steps into one. Instead of creating the menu item and adding it

C and C++ make a clear-cut distinction between two types of pointers: data pointers and function pointers. A function pointer embodies several constituents such as the list of arguments, a

A pure virtual function is merely an interface and can be thought of as a way to enforce policy. A pure virtual function should be used when subclasses implement the

You can use affixes to help the compiler figure out the correct type of a hard coded integer. The letter L affixed to a number indicates a long integer and

An elaborated type specifier is a type name preceded by one of the keywords: enum, struct, union, and class. You can use an elaborated type specifier to instantiate an object

Standard C defines the function bsearch, which performs a binary search on an array of elements. The function bsearch is very efficient, but it works only on sorted arrays. You

It is illegal to assign the address of a static class member to a pointer to member. However, you can take the address of a static member function of a

When a container reallocates its elements, their addresses change correspondingly. Consequently, the values of existing iterators are invalidated: #include #include using namespace std;void main() { list payroll; payroll.push_back(5000.00); list::iterator p

You can define a pointer to a class template member. For example, you can use the specialization vector: typedef void (vector< int >::*v_vi_szt) (size_t); // v_vi_szt is used to hide

All STL (Standard Template Library) containers provide the begin()/end() pair of member functions. The member function begin() returns an iterator that points to the first element of the container: vector

Java’s reflection API allows the instantiation of an object using only its String description. A Java application can determine the class of an object from the associated string and then

In Java, the keyword final qualifies a construct (class, variable, or method) that may not be changed or overridden. Qualifying a variable as final ensures that the variable may not

The gc() call on the Java Virtual Machine’s garbage collector is often misunderstood. One of the reasons Java is such an easy language to program in is that it takes

The Vector class in java.util is one of the most frequently used classes in Java development. It almost makes the problem of memory management non-existent, unlike a fixed-size array. However,

A thrown exception is guaranteed to be caught

It’s easy to change the background color of your page, but if you don’t also define the foreground color and link colors, it’s likely that some users will not be

When you want to serve up a new type of file that Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS) does not recognize, you need to add a MIME type. With older versions

Many times a form that works perfectly well on a table-less Web page stops working when inserted into a table cell. To make the form work again, move the and

When using ASP to create browser cookies, by default the cookie is alive only as long as the browser is running. You can make cookies last longer by defining an

Using a file named ROBOTS.TXT in your root directory allows you to control the indexing behavior of most Web crawlers with respect to your site (search engines like AltaVista use

At times you might want to know how much screen real estate a user has before opening several new browser windows. You also might want to find out if they

You can think of an iterator as a pointer to elements of a container. All STL (Standard Template Library) containers provide the basic iterator type along with its const counterpart.

You can use Dynamic HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to change the color of text on the fly. This functionality can be useful for highlighting a portion of text.

Setting the SelectionMode property of the MSFlexGrid to flexSelectionByRow forces all columns in a row to be selected rather than a single cell. It also allows selection of multiple rows

Often it is desirable to set a background color for an entire layer or DIV region, much like setting the background color for a whole table. Setting a layer background

When designing a Web page that contains CSS layers (DIV sections) and embedded objects (Java applets, plugins, or ActiveX controls), keep in mind that embedded objects do not obey zIndex

Using only a few Windows API calls, you can change the standard VB5 toolbar into an Office 97 look-alike. I’ve implemented two display styles for the toolbar. The first allows

The VB Picture control can hold several different formats of pictures: BMP, DIB, ICO, CUR, WMF, and others under VB5. Additionally, you can use graphics methods to “draw” on the

To minimize the number of controls on my forms, I use a text box as a floating input control that I either overlay onto a grid or swap with a