Since STL is a very large topic to be covered in an article or two, we will focus on the most commonly used generic classes: vector and string.

Welcome to the second in a series of articles introducing the C# programming language. In the previous issue the basics of the language such as variables, methods and classes were covered. In this issue classes are covered in more detail highlighting an important feature called inheritance.

In this article I will focus on the basic features of the language, future articles will cover more advanced topics such as inheritance, interfaces and attributes. After reading this series of articles you will have a basis for determining if C# is for you.

This is the second of a two part article describing an experiment carried out during the 2003 ACCU conference. The first part was published in a previous issue of C Vu (15.6, December 2003) and discussed the background to the experiment and some of the applicable characteristics of the subjects taking part; this one, the second, discusses the results of the experiment.

Every so often I come across the question "should we use return codes or exceptions to report errors."

This article is based on an overview that I wrote to help introduce developers on a pilot project to unit testing. It covers the strategic reasons for using unit tests and the tactics of writing a unit test harness using the freely available JUnit framework to minimise the work involved.