Modern Robust C++ Design Training

This is not a course for beginners. It covers a great deal of material and those who do not meet the course prerequisites will find the course moves too quickly.

• You must have solid recent experience of writing C++ .
• You must have a good appreciation of object-oriented principles.
• You must be comfortable with new and delete operators, class definitions and member functions, constructors and destructors, pointers, references, virtual functions, function overloading, specialisation, inheritance and polymorphism.
• Ideally, you will have attended one of our C++ programming courses and have been using C++ solidly for at least six months.

Please note: Before attending this class delegates must have a Microsoft account (signing up one is free). The instructions on how to set up a Microsoft account can be found here.

At the end of this course you will be able to:

• Describe the modern approach to programming that C++ 11/14/17 facilitates.
• Describe and use advanced techniques for safe copying and forwarding
• Describe and use template techniques for efficient generic coding
• Understand portability issues and how to resolve them.
• Make appropriate use of operator overloading.
• Understand how to write robust constructors.
• Use C++ exceptions appropriately in libraries and in large programs.
• Understand and resolve issues with global variables.
• Understand the appropriate use of constexpr, volatile, unions and bitfields.
• Understand and use the library facilities for multi-threading
• Understand the issues of resource ownership and the use of RAII and smart pointers to make association explicit and safe.
• Describe advanced inheritance techniques, such as private inheritance, multiple inheritance, the template method pattern and down-casting.
• Take full advantage of the standard C++ library
• Make good use of the standard container classes and iterators
• Understand and use variety of OO call-back mechanisms

Why C++ ?

• Object-Oriented Programming
• C++ language design aims
• Language distinctives
• Comparison with C
• Why use C++

Starting Well

• Version Control
• Documenting Code
• Static Analysis
• Unit Testing
• 64-bit issues
• C/C library
• Precompiled Headers

Robust Design

• Single Responsibility Principle
• Reducing Complexity
• Encapsulation
• Keeping header files clean
• Conditional Compilation
• Coding Style
• C++ 11 game-changers

Const, Copying and Conversions

• Const consistency
• Logical vs physical const-ness and the mutable keyword
• The staticcast, dynamiccast, constcast and reinterpretcast keyword casts
• Converting constructors and the explicit keyword
• User defined conversion operators
• Copy construction and assignment
• Efficiency - Copy Elision and Return Value Optimisation

Move and Forward

• R-Value Reference
• Move rather than Copy
• Compiler Synthesised Member Functions
• Rule of Three / Five / Zero
• std::swap, std::move and std::forward
• Perfect forwarding

Strong Primitive Types

• Mission statement for a new design
• Standard libraries for Time and Date
• Creating strongly typed primitive types
• Class Definition Organisation

Operator Overloading

• Deriving operators from a sub-set
• Global functions for binary operators
• Templated operators
• Template Parameter Deduction
• Template Functions with non-argument type parameters
• Template Function Overloading and specialisation
• Template Instantiation and linkage
• Namespaces

Portable Integers and Robust Constructors

• Language specification for integers
• Discovering int size
• Specifying int size
• Template Classes
• Template Class Specialisation and Aliasing
• Single Point Of Maintenance for Constructors
• Argument Range Checking
• Custom Literals

Exception Handling

• Classifying and handling exceptions
• Catching exceptions
• Throwing exceptions
• The standard exception hierarchy
• Uncaught exceptions
• Resource acquisition and release
• Resource Acquisition is Initialisation idiom
• Exceptions and constructors
• Copy Before Release idiom
• Exceptions and destructors
• Commit or Rollback idiom
• STL exception guarantees

Bitfields and Unions

• Bitfields
• Anonymous Union
• Endedness and Bitfield Portability
• Creating a Portable Bitfield
• Template Parameter Checking
• Type Traits
• Static_Assert

Delegation Techniques

• Delegation principles
• Composition
• Adapter patterns
• Inheritance
• Multiple Inheritance
• Name Hiding
• Virtual inheritance
• Interface Classes
• Nested Classes

Statics and Globals

• Storage Class
• static class members
• Stateless Classes
• Static Local Variables
• Global and local access
• Problems with Global Variables
• Safe Global Variables
• The Singleton pattern
• Alternatives to Singleton

Volatile Variables

• Memory Mapped IO
• Volatile
• Placement New
• New and Delete operators
• Placing objects in memory
• Allocating without exceptions

Multithreading Techniques

• Multithreading concepts
• Creating multiple threads in C++
• Creating and managing locks
• Exception-Safe Lock Management
• Simultaneous Reads with a shared mutex
• Thread-Safe Assignment
• Atomic variables
• Condition variables
• Asynchronous functions and futures
• Exceptions in threads

Polymorphism

• Abstract Base Classes
• Benefits and Cost of Polymorphism
• Template Method Pattern
• Pure Virtual Functions
• Smart References and their uses
• Templated Outward Conversions
• The Curiously Recurring Template Pattern
• Downcasting

Safe Association

• Association for Independent Lifetimes
• Structured Lifetimes
• Unique_ptr
• Wrapping new
• 'Pointer' Function Parameters
• Shared_ptr
• Weak_ptr
• Safe Copying with Association

Design Patterns

• Composite
• Cheshire Cat
• Bridge
• Null Object
• Proxy
• Lazy Initialisation
• Dependency Inversion
• Factory
• Dependency Injection

Functional Abstraction

• Events and callbacks
• The Command pattern
• Functor Commands
• Lambda, an alternatives to functors
• Wrapping Traditional callbacks
• Member function pointers
• Function pointer adapters

Containers

• STL Container Classes
• Container Selection
• Container Functions
• Special List and Map/Set functions
• Iterators
• Algorithms
• Modifying Sort