Hello everyone Here's my problem. I have a small set of classes (I'm working on an API). Some of the classes use inheritance hierarchy. Sometimes I need to use (well lots of times) the "this" pointer and work with raw pointers inside each class. However, I would like to work with smart pointers. So I need to change the signature of my member functions to accept smart pointers, but now I need an "this" smart pointer equivalent. I derived the classes from boost::enable_shared_from_this. Basically, what I have is this: class Base : public boost::enable_shared_from_this<Base> { boost::shared_ptr<Base> GetBasePointer() { return shared_from_this(); } void Foo() { shared_ptr<Child> child( new Child ); AddChild( child, GetBasePointer() ); } }; class Derived: public Base, public boost::enable_shared_from_this<Derived> { boost::shared_ptr<Derived> GetDerivedPointer() { return shared_from_this(); } void Bar() { AnotherFunction( GetDerivedPointer() ); ... } }; Now, in the main function I have: int main(...) { boost::shared_ptr<Derived> derived( new Derived ); derived->Foo(); derived->Bar(); } Obviously, this causes a bad_weak_ptr exception, because I'm creating a Derived instance, and the shared_from_this called inside Foo throws the exception, but I need to call this functions defined in the Base class. In other words, I need access to the shared_from_this, in Base and Derived, and right now I can't do this. I would like to know if it's possible to use shared_from_this in this way, or not, and if not, what other options do I have (besides using raw pointers) This is a simplified problem, in my code, generally I have more than 2 leves of class inheritance, so things get more complicated. I hope I explained myself correctly. Thanks in advance.