Re: serialiazation, carchive issue with vc8 and vc6
"mnb111" wrote:
Regarding your comment about "binary serialzation", for
those of us coming
from VS6, we didn't have many options other that MFC's
CArchive. We have a
very extensive app based on VS6 C++. Am I missing
something here or was your
suggestion refering to "starting from scratch"?
We obviously ran into the same problem with CTime. This
was well over a year
ago that we did the first port (first and only). We
searched high and low for
any info about CTime and came up empty. Where did you find
the info on the
macro and is it something new?
What we did was to deserialize into a temp and convert and
reserialize with
a new version. Is there any MFC or VS support for this
type of migration?
Just wondering as we've never heard of the macro (even
though it makes no
sense to us to keep CTime as 32-bit). Thanks for any info
you can provide.
I always considered CArchive rather as proof of concept,
than solution for real life product. It's good for
small/middle sized application as quick and dirty solution.
But when you need to maintain several versions with backward
compatibility for previously saved files, then all hell
breaks loose.
I read your another response to Carl Daniel where you
describe your serialization requirements. In this case, when
speed of save/load is paramount, then binary format can be
the choice. I never measured serialization times personally,
and it can be quite interesting to compare textual
serialization speeds against binary ones (including
workarounds for previous versions for binary).
As possible alternative for raw binary serialization there
is Structured Storage, which implements kind of filesystem
within a file. It can be reasonable compromise between
binary storage and backward compatibility issues.
HTH
Alex