We all had to start somewhere...

In this week's episode of "stuff you find when looking around old hard drives"...

This repository contains the source code of the end-of-semester project written as a part of my university course work. Most of the original files' timestamps point to May/June 2009, which makes sense as "Object Programming" was one of the courses I was attending back then.

Looking through this was a very humbling experience. It obviously has no technical significance, but it gives an insight into what very junior developers can do when given a task to solve and a very vague idea about the language and environment they're using. At the same time, the developer's primary mission is not to fail.

I don't seem to have archived the actual description of the assignment, but it seems like the task was to create some sort of database-ish kind of thing that can read and save its state to a file. MFC and Visual Studio 2008 was the standard environment during the course so that's why it was used here too.

The sources come with a plethora of WTFs :

Hand-rolled implementation of a linked list that uses a static pointer to its beginning and a static counter to hold its length.
The database file format uses ASCII-encoded bytes, i.e. the byte 0xF0 is stored as literal "240 " in the file, occupying, well, four bytes.
I apparently couldn't figure out how to use wchar_t and what all those W classes and functions are for, so _UNICODE is not defined and the project uses "ANSI strings" everywhere.
As a consequence of that, the ACP is implicitly assumed to be Windows-1250 because that's the one I was running. The source files are in this code page as well.
(Most) class and variable names as well as error messages are in Polish.
You need the object's index to access it. In a linked list!
"Obvious" things like large objects being passed by value and total lack of RAII are just cherries on top.

I'd like to think that I've come a long way since then.

lighterowl/semestr-mfc-app

We all had to start somewhere...