Possible problems with NOMINMAX on Visual C++

Question

What problems could I get when defining NOMINMAX before anything else in my program?

As far as I know, this will make not

Answer 1

I generally use NOMINMAX like this to limit the potential side effects:

#define NOMINMAX
#include 
#undef NOMINMAX

That way the scope of the NOMINMAX is relatively confined.

It's not a perfect solution. If something else has already defined NOMINMAX, this pattern fails (though I've never encountered such a case).

If you want to be really, really careful, then you can #include a wrapper header wherever you would have #included windows.h. The wrapper would go something like this:

/* Include this file instead of including  directly. */
#ifdef NOMINMAX
#include 
#else
#define NOMINMAX
#include 
#undef NOMINMAX
#endif

You could imagine doing other things in the wrapper, too, like enforcing UNICODE and/or STRICT.