Before today, my general impression of Visual C++ with all those Microsoft add-ons was that it was:
1. A deviant from some (or many) C++ standards. I mean, come on, what are standards for?
2. Difficult to obtain because you have to pay for the Visual Studio license… Duh, it’s Microsoft.
To their credit, Microsoft does offer a free but stripped-down versions of Visual C++ (and other Microsoft-owned or Microsoft-implemented languages) through their Express editions Also, Microsoft uses part of their money to fund scholarships and research projects so in fairness to them, they are trying to give back in a way…
3. If you manage to get your hands on the license and you finally get to down to learning and coding, you have to familiarize yourself with so many Microsoft-specific stuff, like their use of _rename instead of rename(), etc. The MSDN documentation helps but… there are many classes that don’t have sample codes that could have been useful to a Windows programming newbie.
Thank God that #3 in the list above is not always true. 
Just when I thought I had to learn TCP/IP programming Windows-style and make my own FTP client library implementation, along comes CFtpConnection! It encapsulates the many functionalities of the FTP client in practically one class, leaving me to worry more about the logic of my module than the details. For the record, though, I really don’t mind learning the nitty-gritty of things but our schedule doesn’t really give me a lot of time to study. So… hooray for CFtpConnection! 
What I imagined to be a medium-sized module turned out to be just one wrapper class.
I kinda have mixed feelings about this. I’m happy that I will not be so delayed after all. On the other hand, I really wanted to develop a slightly bigger communications module. But with the schedule that we have, I think I’ll leave that for next time. Why reinvent the wheel, right?
Wait a minute…
I just read that there are some issues about FTP connection timeouts. Hmm… and I thought today was not so bad… 
Oh no. It’s time for me to go home. I’ll research more about this issue tomorrow.
Mata ashita ne…
