Migrating from MSVC 6.0 to Studio 2005?

greywar asks: "While the preferred method would be simply use Linux, unfortunately my company is using Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 with C++. I have been asked to recomend if we should upgrade to the new upcoming visual studio 2005. Has anyone got any real life experience with moving a project of about 220,000 lines of code, 60,000 lines of comments from the old MSVC to the new Studio 2005 which is currently in Beta? What benefits are there, and what things do we lose? What problems will occur?"

Comments

Re:Why bother?

[slcdb]

Is there something wrong with MSVC 6?

Yes. Well, it's not actually anything intrinsically wrong with VC6, but Microsoft has managed to cripple it. All new Platform SDKs are now using a library format that is incompatible with VC6's linker.

So now if an application wants to take advantage of some of the newest Platform SDK functionality (e.g. stuff that's new in Vista), VC6 will likely not be able to link with the required libraries.

I doubt that there was anything that absolutely needed to be changed with regard to the library format. I'm of the opinion that this was a carefully crafted Microsoft strategy to force developers to stop using VC6 (which is the oldest Visual Studio release that still has a large number of active users).

Re:Why is strlen "unsafe"?

[cookd]

Three issues:

1. Resources. It might slow down the system while scanning for the nul.
2. SegFault is still not a good idea.
3. Most important: The result from strlen gets used elsewhere. If the string is unterminated, you've just put a large random number into your code. Somebody else might assume that the result from strlen is a reasonable size (10-20 bytes), when it really is more like 10k, and you weren't prepared for a 10k string.