no[1]In a previous post, I talked about the problem of Windows messaging not working well with smart pointers and type-safe programming practices.  I’ve come up with a fairly good solution for this in MFC, and was interested in writing an article about it, so I sent submission proposals to MSDN Magazine and Dr. Dobb’s Journal.

MSDN sent a rejection letter, as I expected.  MFC, the Win32 message-passing API, and, frankly, C++ in general are very passe technologies compared with their usual topics, so although I had tried my best to spin it as retro-cool, and an example of a practical programming technique for reengineering legacy systems with modern C++ concepts, I still didn’t get any nibble of interest.  I haven’t heard back from Dr. Dobb’s, but I’m expecting the same response (or no response) from them.

In the meantime, I’ve found a few minor holes in my approach, and while none of them are fatal or even really relevant to my original need, and I could probably fix them with enough additional spit-and-polish effort, I have enough other things to do that I’m not really interested in doing so at this point.  With that decision, however, I realize that the sum total of what I’ve done isn’t really up to full print publication-quality, so I’m not going to pursue the magazines any more, and just write it up here and at the Code Project. So expect to see a couple additional articles on my technique in the coming weeks, along with a discussion about what the holes are and what might be able to be done to deal with them.

Stay tuned!