Tip when building C++ client using MFC

Question

Hi,
If you've ever tried to build coherence when MFC is enabled (and probably AFX), you will have encountered clashes with various Oracle and Microsoft #defines. It results in a stream of nonsense from the compiler.
I've managed to track down the offending #defines. To get around the problem I create a header file called 'coherence_include.h' which looks like this.
#pragma once
#pragma push_macro("IGNORE")
#pragma push_macro("CONST")
#pragma push_macro("INFINITE")
// clashes discovered thus far
#undef IGNORE
#undef CONST
#undef INFINITE
// add coherence includes required here
#include "coherence/lang.ns"
#include "coherence/io/pof/PortableObject.hpp"
#include "coherence/net/CacheFactory.hpp"
#pragma pop_macro("IGNORE")
#pragma pop_macro("CONST")
#pragma pop_macro("INFINITE")This preserves all the #defines that were defined by MFC (via the inclusion of stdafx.h) and reinstates them once coherence has been included.
You can now safely include this header file from any of you CPP files.
Cheers
Rich

Answer 1

Hi Rich,
Thanks for the good work-around. We recently became aware of this issue and it is adressed in the upcoming release. It was rather unfortunate, all our #defines are prefixed by COH_, and all our other constants are declared as enums or const statics within our namespace. But unfortunately Microsoft has a habit of using an endless series of non-prefixed #defines, thus making for many possible collisions. We found a fairly large number these name collisions and ended up opting to switch to avoiding using all caps names for namespaced constants. Luckily the use of our constants in application code should be very minimal, and refactoring to the new release should require little to no changes.
Thanks,
Mark
Oracle Coherence