This book describes product differences and portability issues between the Alpha and x86 platforms. You will find this information useful regardless of whether you are porting existing code from the x86 platform or have been programming on the x86 platform and are writing new applications for one or more Alpha platforms.
Note The documentation for the x86 edition of Visual C++ applies to the Alpha edition as well, except where this manual specifically states otherwise.
You should read this book, especially the first chapter, when writing C/C++ code in a Alpha environment for the first time. Depending on how you use Visual C++ and what kind of programming you do, you may not need to read all the chapters. You can glance at the chapters now and come back to them when you need to do related work.
Chapter 1, Product Overview, provides a brief description of how the editions of Visual C++ for the Alpha and x86 platforms differ in major capabilities.
Chapter 2, Working in the Alpha Visual C++ Environment, describes how to start porting code by copying and adapting project and source files from the x86 platform. This chapter also describes the differences between the development environments.
Chapters 3 and 4 discuss portability issues and command-line changes (including external makefiles). These chapters present information for developers who need detailed information on how to move their applications to Alpha platforms, as well as optimize the performance of applications on Alpha platforms.
Chapter 5, Features Specific to Alpha, discusses features of Visual C++, and specific programmatic concerns that are unique to the Alpha platform.
Chapter 6, Using the Alpha Inline Assembler, discusses the use of inline assembly in the Alpha version of Visual C++. This chapter also provides examples of how to properly write assembly code for these platforms.