August 2012 Archives

While my strongest programming language now is Java, there was a time long ago where my strongest language and my preferred language was C++. In my educational career and early personal projects, I did a lot of work in C++, but in my professional career I've done mostly Java. Recently I had an opportunity to build a non-trivial program in C++, something I haven't had a chance to do in some years (since GNE). I was surprised at how fast my knowledge came back, it seems that learning a programming language is like learning to ride a bike -- you never quite forget. But through this project, I came to revisit a lot of my opinions. The main one is that over time I ended up underestimating the power of C++ and overestimating the difficulty of building C++ programs compared to managed languages like C#/Java.

While I still feel development is much faster and easier in managed languages, I noticed right away two features I really missed.

When I updated my WinSCP beta recently, I noticed that the jump list stopped updating. I'm not quite sure why it stopped, but clearing out the value "JumpList" from the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Martin Prikryl\WinSCP 2\Configuration cleared the jump list, then recent sessions would be added to the jump list. I was unable to find this issue via Google search, so hopefully this blog post makes its way to some other searchers having the same problem.