Cygon’s Blog

I’ve got Visual C++ 2008 Express installed on my Windows Vista x64 system and it’s running just fine. Double clicking a project doesn’t work due to UAC and it doesn’t do x64 projects, but at least I’ve got a decent IDE with strong C++ support.

This weekend, however, I had started thinking about doing an x64 build of Ogre3D, a free 3d graphics engine that is continuing to gather highly interesting features such as Blender integration (a 3d modeling toolkit) and a large scale paging terrain addon.

You can do x64 development for free if you install Microsoft’s Windows SDK, but you will have to do without the IDE - and without the project configurations and even without vcbuild.exe, meaning you have to run the compiler, librarian and linker yourself from the command line. Thus, I wrote some NAnt scripts which called these utilities with the arguments Visual C++ 2008 Express was using - with the necessary changes to do an x64 build of course.

This worked fine, but writing a complete build system from scratch isn’t exactly a pleasing experience and while I did get the job done, enough at least to build x64 binaries of the FreeImage library (which already is no small feat if you, like me, want to integrate the latest versions of the libpng, libmng, libtiff, jpeg, openjpeg and openexr libraries).

Then I remembered that there was an trial version of Visual Studio 2008 Professional available for download. I downloaded it, installed and… no x64 project configurations were available. In fact, I couldn’t even add another project configuration.

I know how to set up an x64 project because at work, I’ve got Visual Studio 2008 Professional on my workstation and among all the Smart Device platforms, I can select x64 as the target platform. No so in this case.

Another 30 minutes later I had uninstalled everything (Uninstalling Visual Studio 2008 leaves most of the Visual Studio packages on your system as it turns out) and went on to reinstall Visual Studio 2008 a second time, again making sure that I had ticked the x64 compiler and libraries.

Visual Studio 2008 installed, I could create a new project, but again, no way to create an x64 project, let alone select any configuration between an Win32, standard x86 build.

Well, if Microsoft intended the trial to get me interested in buying Visual Studio 2008 Standard (or even Visual Studio 2008 Professional): you failed, miserably.

I suspect the problem is that if you already have installed Visual C++ 2008 Express, installing Visual Studio 2008 Professional will leave you without the x64 targets. To validate this theory however, I’d have to reinstall Windows Vista which I… erm… don’t feel like doing right now.

I’ve been using BitTorrent for several years now. Where else, for example, to obtain the latest Top Gear episode?

The first client I tried was Azureus. Azureus worked fine for some time, but when Azureus Vuze came, which tries to transform Azureus from a functional torrent client into a platform for searching, viewing and publishing files on the BitTorrent network, I decided to go looking for an alternative.

I then used uTorrent for some time. It was more responsive than Azureus and got the job done, but after I upgraded to Windows Server 2008 (Beta3), it regularly started hanging. Worse even, it took a “break” (>5 minutes of unresponsiveness) whenever I tried to add a new torrent to the list. So I checked out some other BitTorrent clients, but eventually came back to…

Azureus. As I found out, you can disable the fancy new GUI in Azureus. Azureus worked, but after leaving it running on my home server for a day, the whole RAM was taken.Not by Azureus, but something about Azureus allocation behavior caused the Windows Memory Manager to fragment its memory or whatever, so that after a day, 99% of memory were filled with …nothing and everything that could be paged out had been moved to the page file. So with my latest home server reinstall, I went hunting for another BitTorrent client.

That’s when I discovered Halite. Halite is written in C++ and uses the Boost (www.boost.org) library, so it’s completely built on technology I know and respect. For those who don’t know, Boost is a collection of pretty advanced C++ libraries that attract a certain mindset of programmers — using Boost is already a bold indication that no whacky hobby coder is at work here). There even is an x64 build of Halite. So for the first time ever, I’m running a 64-bit BitTorrent client. And it is working extremely well. It’s fast, responsive and uses very little memory.