A Fly-by-Wire Architecture for Multi-Threaded Windows Apps: How to Write Complex But Reliable Windows Applications Quickly

“A Fly-by-Wire Architecture for Multi-Threaded Windows Apps” demonstrates the power and beauty of multi-threading—and its necessity in complex applications that perform lengthy processing or that wait for stimulus from outside of the program. The book presents an architecture for structuring multi-threaded Windows applications, brings readers to an understanding of these techniques, and prepares them to employ the concepts in their own Windows apps. The architecture is “fly-by-wire” because it is modeled after systems whose components are interconnected not directly but by a network over which the components communicate using messages. The author makes use of the fly-by-wire organization within Windows applications themselves. Thus structured, a program comprises nuggets of functionality, which do most of their work in child-threads and communicate by messages over a “logical bus,” all within the program itself. Borrowing another feature of digital circuitry, the author equips his programs with a software clock; its ticks drive processing, synchronizing activity and communication among the various threads. To illustrate the concepts, the book presents the design and source code for a completely functioning Windows application to control a hypothetical robot, and makes the source code available on a companion website. Visit www.flybywirewinapps.com to learn more. The author draws on his 35 years in the industry to make potentially controversial observations about software development process, aimed at recognizing the difference between theory and practice, and incorporates his views on what constitutes elegance in software design.