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C++ tutorials, C and C++ news, and information about Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and Vcpkg from the Microsoft C++ team.
March 20, 2019Mar 20, 201903/20/19In Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 we made the compiler back-end to prune away debug information that is unrelated to code or data emitted into binary and changed certain hash implementations in the PDB engine, to improve linker throughput, which resulted in more than 2x reduction on link time for some large AAA game title.
March 19, 2019Mar 19, 201903/19/19The C++ compiler in Visual Studio 2019 includes several new optimizations and improvements geared towards increasing the performance of games and making game developers more productive by reducing the compilation time of large projects. Although the focus of this blog post is on the game industry,
March 7, 2019Mar 7, 201903/7/19Visual Studio 2019 Preview 3 introduces a new feature to reduce the binary size of C++ exception handling (try/catch and automatic destructors) on x64. Dubbed FH4 (for __CxxFrameHandler4, see below), I developed new formatting and processing for data used for C++ exception handling that is ~60% smaller than the existing implementation resulting in overall binary reduction of up to 20% for programs with heavy usage of C++ exception handling.
February 27, 2019Feb 27, 201902/27/19We are pleased to echo NVIDIA’s announcement for CUDA 10.1 today, and are particularly excited about CUDA 10.1’s continued compatibility for Visual Studio. CUDA 10.1 will work with RC, RTW and future updates of Visual Studio 2019.
February 27, 2019Feb 27, 201902/27/19Visual Studio typically manages all the details of CMake for you, under the hood, when you open a project. However, some development workflows require more fine-grained control over how CMake is invoked. The latest Visual Studio 2019 Preview lets you have complete control over CMake if your project needs more flexibility.
February 15, 2019Feb 15, 201902/15/19Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 was a huge release for us, so we’ve written a host of articles to explore the changes in more detail. For the short version, see the Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 Release Notes.
February 6, 2019Feb 6, 201902/6/19This post builds on using multi-stage containers for C++ development. That post showed how to use a single Dockerfile to describe a build stage and a deployment stage resulting in a container optimized for deployment. It did not show you how to use a containers with your development environment.
February 1, 2019Feb 1, 201902/1/19We have made a bunch of improvements to Visual Studio’s CMake support in the latest preview of the IDE. Many of these changes are taking the first steps to close the gap between working with solutions generated by CMake and the IDE’s native support.
January 31, 2019Jan 31, 201901/31/19Visual Studio 2019 pushes the boundaries of individual and team productivity. We hope that you will find these new capabilities compelling and start your upgrade to Visual Studio 2019 soon.
As you are considering this upgrade,
January 31, 2019Jan 31, 201901/31/19The January 2019 update of the Visual Studio Code C++ extension is now available. This release includes many new features and bug fixes including documentation comments support, improved #include autocomplete performance, better member function completion, and many IntelliSense bug fixes.
Announcement
March 7, 2019Mar 7, 201903/7/19Visual Studio 2019 Preview 3 introduces a new feature to reduce the binary size of C++ exception handling (try/catch and automatic destructors) on x64. Dubbed FH4 (for __CxxFrameHandler4, see below), I developed new formatting and processing for data used for C++ exception handling that is ~60% smaller than the existing implementation resulting in overall binary reduction of up to 20% for programs with heavy usage of C++ exception handling.
February 27, 2019Feb 27, 201902/27/19We are pleased to echo NVIDIA’s announcement for CUDA 10.1 today, and are particularly excited about CUDA 10.1’s continued compatibility for Visual Studio. CUDA 10.1 will work with RC, RTW and future updates of Visual Studio 2019.
February 27, 2019Feb 27, 201902/27/19Visual Studio typically manages all the details of CMake for you, under the hood, when you open a project. However, some development workflows require more fine-grained control over how CMake is invoked. The latest Visual Studio 2019 Preview lets you have complete control over CMake if your project needs more flexibility.
February 15, 2019Feb 15, 201902/15/19Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 was a huge release for us, so we’ve written a host of articles to explore the changes in more detail. For the short version, see the Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 Release Notes.
February 1, 2019Feb 1, 201902/1/19We have made a bunch of improvements to Visual Studio’s CMake support in the latest preview of the IDE. Many of these changes are taking the first steps to close the gap between working with solutions generated by CMake and the IDE’s native support.
January 31, 2019Jan 31, 201901/31/19Visual Studio 2019 pushes the boundaries of individual and team productivity. We hope that you will find these new capabilities compelling and start your upgrade to Visual Studio 2019 soon.
As you are considering this upgrade,
January 31, 2019Jan 31, 201901/31/19The January 2019 update of the Visual Studio Code C++ extension is now available. This release includes many new features and bug fixes including documentation comments support, improved #include autocomplete performance, better member function completion, and many IntelliSense bug fixes.
January 28, 2019Jan 28, 201901/28/19Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 is an exciting release for the C++ code analysis team. In this release, we shipped a new set of experimental rules that help you catch bugs in your codebase, namely: use-after-move and coroutine checks.
January 28, 2019Jan 28, 201901/28/19Concurrency Code Analysis in Visual Studio 2019
The battle against concurrency bugs poses a serious challenge to C++ developers. The problem is exacerbated by the advent of multi-core and many-core architectures. To cope with the increasing complexity of multithreaded software,
January 24, 2019Jan 24, 201901/24/19Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 introduces a new CMake Project Settings Editor to help you more easily configure your CMake projects in Visual Studio. The editor provides an alternative to modifying the CMakeSettings.json file directly and allows you to create and manage your CMake configurations.
C++ Q&A Series
December 11, 2018Dec 11, 201812/11/18This post is also available on Simon Brand’s blog
C++17 merged in a paper called Guaranteed copy elision through simplified value categories. The changes mandate that no copies or moves take place in some situations where they were previously allowed,
Clang
November 6, 2018Nov 6, 201811/6/18In the previous post in this series, we used clang-query to examine the Abstract Syntax Tree of a simple source code file. Using clang-query, we can prototype an AST Matcher which we can use in a clang-tidy check to refactor code in bulk.
October 23, 2018Oct 23, 201810/23/18This post is part of a regular series of posts where the C++ product team and other guests answer questions we have received from customers. The questions can be about anything C++ related: MSVC toolset, the standard language and library,
October 19, 2018Oct 19, 201810/19/18This post is part of a regular series of posts where the C++ product team and other guests answer questions we have received from customers. The questions can be about anything C++ related: MSVC toolset, the standard language and library,
September 18, 2018Sep 18, 201809/18/18This post is part of a regular series of posts where the C++ product team and other guests answer questions we have received from customers. The questions can be about anything C++ related: MSVC toolset, the standard language and library,
CMake
February 27, 2019Feb 27, 201902/27/19Visual Studio typically manages all the details of CMake for you, under the hood, when you open a project. However, some development workflows require more fine-grained control over how CMake is invoked. The latest Visual Studio 2019 Preview lets you have complete control over CMake if your project needs more flexibility.
February 1, 2019Feb 1, 201902/1/19We have made a bunch of improvements to Visual Studio’s CMake support in the latest preview of the IDE. Many of these changes are taking the first steps to close the gap between working with solutions generated by CMake and the IDE’s native support.
January 24, 2019Jan 24, 201901/24/19Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 introduces a new CMake Project Settings Editor to help you more easily configure your CMake projects in Visual Studio. The editor provides an alternative to modifying the CMakeSettings.json file directly and allows you to create and manage your CMake configurations.
December 13, 2018Dec 13, 201812/13/18Containers are a great tool for configuring reproducible build environments. It’s fairly easy to find Dockerfiles that provide various C++ environments. Unfortunately, it is hard to find guidance on how to use newer techniques like multi-stage builds. This post will show you how you can leverage the capabilities of multi-stage containers for your C++ development.
July 25, 2018Jul 25, 201807/25/18Last week we shipped the July 2018 update to the C/C++ extension for Visual Studio Code. In this update we added support for a new experimental API that allows build system extensions to pass IntelliSense configuration information to our extension for powering up full IntelliSense experience.
June 27, 2018Jun 27, 201806/27/18Visual Studio 2017 15.8 Preview 3 is now available and it includes several improvements to the CMake tools. In addition to a few fixes we have simplified the way you can configure your CMakeSettings.json file by adding configuration templates.
May 2, 2018May 2, 201805/2/18Visual Studio 2017 15.7 Preview 4 is now available and we have added a few more CMake features in addition to the Targets View and single file compilation added in Preview 3. We keep the version of CMake that ships with Visual Studio as fresh as possible,
April 9, 2018Apr 9, 201804/9/18Visual Studio 2017 15.7 Preview 3 is now available, which includes several improvements to the CMake tools. The latest preview offers more control than ever over how to visualize, build, and manage your CMake projects.
Please download the preview and check out the latest CMake features such as the Targets View,
March 13, 2018Mar 13, 201803/13/18In Visual Studio 2017 15.7 Preview 1 we have made a number of improvements to our support to the Linux C++ workload based on your feedback. You can learn more about our Linux C++ workload in Visual Studio here.
January 10, 2018Jan 10, 201801/10/18We are excited to announce new CMake features in Visual Studio 2017 version 15.6 Preview 2. In the latest preview, we have improved CTest’s integration with the IDE, including rich support for the Google and Boost unit testing frameworks.
Containers
December 13, 2018Dec 13, 201812/13/18Containers are a great tool for configuring reproducible build environments. It’s fairly easy to find Dockerfiles that provide various C++ environments. Unfortunately, it is hard to find guidance on how to use newer techniques like multi-stage builds. This post will show you how you can leverage the capabilities of multi-stage containers for your C++ development.
August 14, 2018Aug 14, 201808/14/18Containers allow developers to package up an application with all the parts it needs, such as libraries and other dependencies, and ship it all out as one image. This is especially useful for C++ cross-platform development – with containers you can choose to target a platform that runs on a completely different operating system than your developer machine.
August 13, 2018Aug 13, 201808/13/18Containers encapsulate the runtime environment of an application: the file system, environment settings, and virtualized OS are bundled into a package. Docker containers have changed the way we think about build and test environments since they were introduced five years ago.
Coroutine
February 2, 2017Feb 2, 201702/2/17Previously on this blog we have talked about Resumable Functions, and even recently we touched on the renaming of the yield keyword to co_yield in our implementation in Visual Studio 2017. I am very excited about this potential C++ standards feature,
January 27, 2017Jan 27, 201701/27/17Coroutines—formerly known as “C++ resumable functions”—are one of the Technical Specifications (TS) that we have implemented in the Visual C++ compiler. We’ve supported coroutines for three years—ever since the VC++ November 2013 CTP release.
Diagnostics
September 26, 2018Sep 26, 201809/26/18Step Back for C++
In the most recent, 15.9, update to Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise Edition, we’ve added “Step Back” for C++ developers targeting Windows 10 Anniversary Update (1607) and later. With this feature, you can now return to a previous state while debugging without having to restart the entire process.
March 22, 2018Mar 22, 201803/22/18This post was written by Sergiy Oryekhov.
The C++ Core Guidelines Check extension received several new rules in Visual Studio 2017 15.7 Preview 2. The primary focus in this iteration was on the checks that would make it easier to adopt utilities from the Guidelines Support Library.
March 13, 2018Mar 13, 201803/13/18We’re making it easier to configure and use the C++ code analysis features with a set of changes targeting 15.7. In the first 15.7 preview we’ve cleaned up the UI, fixed our documentation links and,
February 23, 2018Feb 23, 201802/23/18We’ve improved the C++ Code Analysis toolset with every major compiler update in Visual Studio 2017. Version 15.6, now in Preview, includes a set of arithmetic overflow checks. This article discusses those checks and why you’ll want to enable them in your code.
December 14, 2017Dec 14, 201712/14/17Image Watch is a Visual Studio extension that provides a watch window for viewing in-memory bitmaps when debugging native C++ code. It comes with built-in support for OpenCV image types (e.g. cv::Mat, cv::Mat_<> , etc.).
December 13, 2017Dec 13, 201712/13/17The “broken warnings theory” is a fictional theory of the norm-setting and signaling effect of coding practices and bug-checking techniques in 3rd party libraries on new bugs and design anti-patterns.
July 21, 2017Jul 21, 201707/21/17This post as well as described diagnostics significantly benefited from the feedback by Mark, Xiang, Stephan, Marian, Gabriel, Ulzii, Steve and Andrew.
Visual Studio 2017 15.3.0 release comes with a number of improvements to the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler’s diagnostics.
July 13, 2017Jul 13, 201707/13/17This post written by Mark Hall, Xiang Fan, Yuriy Solodkyy, Bat-Ulzii Luvsanbat, and Andrew Pardoe.
Precompiled headers can reduce your compilation times significantly. They’ve worked reliably for millions of developers since they were introduced 25 years ago to speed up builds of MFC apps.
June 22, 2015Jun 22, 201506/22/15By popular request, in Visual Studio 2015 RTM, we’ve implemented the checking of arguments given to printf/scanf and their variations in the C standard library. You can try the examples from this post in our online compiler.
Documentation
November 26, 2018Nov 26, 201811/26/18A great strength of C++ is the ability to target multiple platforms without sacrificing performance. If you are using the same codebase for multiple targets, then CMake is the most common solution for building your software. You can use Visual Studio for your C++ cross platform development when using CMake without needing to create or generate Visual Studio projects.
September 18, 2018Sep 18, 201809/18/1815.7 was our first feature complete C++17 library (except floating-point <charconv>), and in 15.8 we have addressed large numbers of outstanding bugs. As usual, we’ve maintained a detailed list of the STL fixes that are available. Visual Studio 2017 15.8 is available at https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/.
September 11, 2018Sep 11, 201809/11/18This post is part of a regular series of posts where the C++ product team here at Microsoft and other guests answer questions we have received from customers. The questions can be about anything C++ related: MSVC toolset, the standard language and library,
July 5, 2018Jul 5, 201807/5/18This post was written by Olga Arkhipova and Xiang Fan
Oftentimes, multiple projects in a Visual Studio solution use the same (or very similar) precompiled headers. As pch files are often big and building them takes a significant amount of time,
March 27, 2018Mar 27, 201803/27/18Whether you are creating a new (or modifying an existing) C++ project using a Wizard, or importing an project into Visual Studio from another IDE, it’s important to configure the project correctly for the IntelliSense and Browsing features to provide accurate information.
February 17, 2017Feb 17, 201702/17/17Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) is an easy way to help your team manage code and stay connected when developing. VSTS supports continuous integration using a shared code repository that everyone on the team uses to check in code changes.
February 8, 2017Feb 8, 201702/8/17The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) was first introduced at Build in 2016 and was delivered as an early beta in Windows 10 Anniversary Update. Since then, the WSL team has been hard at work, dramatically improving WSL’s abilty to run an ever increasing number of native Linux command-line binaries and tools,
November 8, 2016Nov 8, 201611/8/16We on the Visual C++ documentation team are pleased to announce some changes to the API reference content in the following Visual C++ libraries: STL, MFC, ATL, AMP, and ConcRT.
Since the beginning of MSDN online, the Visual C++ libraries have documented each class member,
Experimental
January 28, 2019Jan 28, 201901/28/19Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 is an exciting release for the C++ code analysis team. In this release, we shipped a new set of experimental rules that help you catch bugs in your codebase, namely: use-after-move and coroutine checks.
July 6, 2018Jul 6, 201807/6/18Why re-write the preprocessor?
Recently, we published a blog post on C++ conformance completion. As mentioned in the blog post, the preprocessor in MSVC is currently getting an overhaul. We are doing this to improve its language conformance,
June 26, 2018Jun 26, 201806/26/18The Visual C++ team has been working to refresh our code analysis experience inside Visual Studio. We’re aiming to make these tools both more useful and natural to use and hope that they’ll benefit you no matter your workflow, style,
December 13, 2017Dec 13, 201712/13/17The “broken warnings theory” is a fictional theory of the norm-setting and signaling effect of coding practices and bug-checking techniques in 3rd party libraries on new bugs and design anti-patterns.
July 13, 2017Jul 13, 201707/13/17This post written by Mark Hall, Xiang Fan, Yuriy Solodkyy, Bat-Ulzii Luvsanbat, and Andrew Pardoe.
Precompiled headers can reduce your compilation times significantly. They’ve worked reliably for millions of developers since they were introduced 25 years ago to speed up builds of MFC apps.
June 3, 2016Jun 3, 201606/3/16This blog post written by Dave Bartolomeo, Yuriy Solodkyy, and Andrew Pardoe
We have just released our fifth out-of-band update of Clang/C2 toolset. As always, this release has been driven by your feedback. While we’ve heard a lot of feature requests the one’s we’ve heard most frequently are that you want Clang 3.8 and you want x64-hosted compilers.
January 20, 2016Jan 20, 201601/20/16We have just released an out-of-band update of Clang/C2 toolset that brings in some of the community fixes as well as bugs found from testing. This is one of many rapid releases to come in the future, and issues reported from customers will be addressed progressively.
January 20, 2016Jan 20, 201601/20/16Introduction
This post is about Intel® Memory Protection Extensions (Intel® MPX) support in Microsoft Visual Studio* 2015; content provided by Gautham Beeraka, George Kuan, and Juan Rodriguez from Intel Corporation.
Overview
Update 1 for Visual Studio 2015 was announced on November 30,
December 4, 2015Dec 4, 201512/4/15[This post was written by Dave Bartolomeo and the Clang/C2 feature crew]
One of the challenges with developing and maintaining cross-platform C++ code is dealing with different C++ compilers for different platforms. You write some code that builds fine with the Visual C++ compiler for your Windows-targeting build,
faster
March 20, 2019Mar 20, 201903/20/19In Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 we made the compiler back-end to prune away debug information that is unrelated to code or data emitted into binary and changed certain hash implementations in the PDB engine, to improve linker throughput, which resulted in more than 2x reduction on link time for some large AAA game title.
January 4, 2018Jan 4, 201801/4/18As C++ programs get larger and larger and the optimizer becomes more complex the compiler’s build time, or throughput, increasingly comes into focus. It’s something that needs to be continually addressed as new patterns emerge and take hold (such as “unity”
October 5, 2016Oct 5, 201610/5/16Continuing with our goal of further improving developer productivity with Visual Studio 2017 there have been major investments made for also improving incremental developer builds. The developer incremental build is one where a developer changes a single or multiple source files and builds.
October 5, 2016Oct 5, 201610/5/16The Visual C++ product has had projects ever since its inception. Visual C++ had its own IDE up through Visual Studio 6. Starting in Visual Studio .NET, C++ moved to a new IDE shared by Visual Basic, C#, C++, and other tools.
Featured
General C++ Series
November 20, 2018Nov 20, 201811/20/18This post is part of a regular series of posts where the C++ product team here at Microsoft answers questions we have received from customers. The questions can be about anything C++ related: Visual C++,
November 6, 2018Nov 6, 201811/6/18In the previous post in this series, we used clang-query to examine the Abstract Syntax Tree of a simple source code file. Using clang-query, we can prototype an AST Matcher which we can use in a clang-tidy check to refactor code in bulk.
October 23, 2018Oct 23, 201810/23/18This post is part of a regular series of posts where the C++ product team and other guests answer questions we have received from customers. The questions can be about anything C++ related: MSVC toolset, the standard language and library,
October 19, 2018Oct 19, 201810/19/18This post is part of a regular series of posts where the C++ product team and other guests answer questions we have received from customers. The questions can be about anything C++ related: MSVC toolset, the standard language and library,
October 16, 2018Oct 16, 201810/16/18Today we have a guest post from Marc Gregoire, Software Architect at Nikon Metrology and Microsoft MVP since 2007.
The C++14 standard already contains a wealth of different kinds of algorithms. C++17 adds a couple more algorithms and updates some existing ones.
October 11, 2018Oct 11, 201810/11/18Class Template Argument Deduction (CTAD) is a C++17 Core Language feature that reduces code verbosity. C++17’s Standard Library also supports CTAD, so after upgrading your toolset, you can take advantage of this new feature when using STL types like std::pair and std::vector.
October 4, 2018Oct 4, 201810/4/18This post is part of a regular series of posts where the C++ product team here at Microsoft and other guests answer questions we have received from customers. The questions can be about anything C++ related: MSVC toolset,
September 25, 2018Sep 25, 201809/25/18This post is part of a regular series of posts where the C++ product team here at Microsoft and other guests answer questions we have received from customers. The questions can be about anything C++ related: MSVC toolset, the standard language and library,
September 18, 2018Sep 18, 201809/18/18This post is part of a regular series of posts where the C++ product team and other guests answer questions we have received from customers. The questions can be about anything C++ related: MSVC toolset, the standard language and library,
September 11, 2018Sep 11, 201809/11/18This post is part of a regular series of posts where the C++ product team here at Microsoft and other guests answer questions we have received from customers. The questions can be about anything C++ related: MSVC toolset, the standard language and library,
IoT
October 23, 2017Oct 23, 201710/23/17⏱ Updated on January 10, 2018 to cover addition of debugging support in Visual Studio 2017 15.6
In Visual Studio 2017 15.5 we are introduced support for cross compilation targeting ARM microcontrollers.
September 13, 2016Sep 13, 201609/13/16The Visual C++ for Linux announcement post has been updated with the content below. If you are already familiar with this extension this post covers what is new since our last update.
We recently posted new bits for our 1.0.5 release of the Visual C++ for Linux extension for Visual Studio 2015.
June 7, 2016Jun 7, 201606/7/16Updated 6/14/2016: We updated the original announcement post with the content below if you want a single page that covers everything about this extension. The below remains the same and just covers the updates from the original release.
Linux
January 24, 2019Jan 24, 201901/24/19Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 introduces a new CMake Project Settings Editor to help you more easily configure your CMake projects in Visual Studio. The editor provides an alternative to modifying the CMakeSettings.json file directly and allows you to create and manage your CMake configurations.
December 13, 2018Dec 13, 201812/13/18Containers are a great tool for configuring reproducible build environments. It’s fairly easy to find Dockerfiles that provide various C++ environments. Unfortunately, it is hard to find guidance on how to use newer techniques like multi-stage builds. This post will show you how you can leverage the capabilities of multi-stage containers for your C++ development.
March 13, 2018Mar 13, 201803/13/18In Visual Studio 2017 15.7 Preview 1 we have made a number of improvements to our support to the Linux C++ workload based on your feedback. You can learn more about our Linux C++ workload in Visual Studio here.
October 23, 2017Oct 23, 201710/23/17We have introduced a new capability to run remote tasks in Visual Studio 2017 15.5 Preview 2. This capability allows you to run any command on a remote system that is defined in Visual Studio’s Connection Manager.
August 25, 2017Aug 25, 201708/25/17In Visual Studio 2017 15.4 you can now target Linux from your CMake projects. This enables you to work on your existing code base that uses CMake as your build solution without having to convert it to a VS project.
February 22, 2017Feb 22, 201702/22/17Concepts promise to fundamentally change how we write templated C++ code. They’re in a Technical Specification (TS) right now, but, like Coroutines, Modules, and Ranges, it’s good to get a head start on learning these important features before they make it into the C++ Standard.
February 8, 2017Feb 8, 201702/8/17The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) was first introduced at Build in 2016 and was delivered as an early beta in Windows 10 Anniversary Update. Since then, the WSL team has been hard at work, dramatically improving WSL’s abilty to run an ever increasing number of native Linux command-line binaries and tools,
February 2, 2017Feb 2, 201702/2/17Previously on this blog we have talked about Resumable Functions, and even recently we touched on the renaming of the yield keyword to co_yield in our implementation in Visual Studio 2017. I am very excited about this potential C++ standards feature,
September 13, 2016Sep 13, 201609/13/16The Visual C++ for Linux announcement post has been updated with the content below. If you are already familiar with this extension this post covers what is new since our last update.
We recently posted new bits for our 1.0.5 release of the Visual C++ for Linux extension for Visual Studio 2015.
June 7, 2016Jun 7, 201606/7/16Updated 6/14/2016: We updated the original announcement post with the content below if you want a single page that covers everything about this extension. The below remains the same and just covers the updates from the original release.
Migration DevLab
March 7, 2017Mar 7, 201703/7/17Visual Studio 2017 is a major leap forward in terms of C++ functionality compared with VS 2015. We hope the new release will delight you in your day-to-day job as soon as you can upgrade.
This blog post focuses on the steps needed to upgrade from Visual Studio 2015 to 2017.
February 24, 2016Feb 24, 201602/24/16⏱ Updated on March 11, 2019 with the latest functionality in Visual Studio 2017
Are you currently developing your C++ projects in an older version of Visual Studio? If your reasons for avoiding the all-new features in VS 2017 are covered next,
Mobile
December 13, 2017Dec 13, 201712/13/17Visual Studio has provided in-box support for building C++ Android and iOS apps or libraries since VS 2015, enabling cross-platform C++ mobile development with full editing and debugging capabilities all in one single IDE.
Just recently,
New Feature
March 7, 2019Mar 7, 201903/7/19Visual Studio 2019 Preview 3 introduces a new feature to reduce the binary size of C++ exception handling (try/catch and automatic destructors) on x64. Dubbed FH4 (for __CxxFrameHandler4, see below), I developed new formatting and processing for data used for C++ exception handling that is ~60% smaller than the existing implementation resulting in overall binary reduction of up to 20% for programs with heavy usage of C++ exception handling.
January 28, 2019Jan 28, 201901/28/19Concurrency Code Analysis in Visual Studio 2019
The battle against concurrency bugs poses a serious challenge to C++ developers. The problem is exacerbated by the advent of multi-core and many-core architectures. To cope with the increasing complexity of multithreaded software,
January 24, 2019Jan 24, 201901/24/19Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 introduces a new CMake Project Settings Editor to help you more easily configure your CMake projects in Visual Studio. The editor provides an alternative to modifying the CMakeSettings.json file directly and allows you to create and manage your CMake configurations.
January 24, 2019Jan 24, 201901/24/19The C++ team has been working to refresh the Code Analysis experience inside Visual Studio. Last year, we blogged about some in-progress features in this area. We’re happy to announce that in Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2, we’ve integrated code analysis directly into the editor,
January 24, 2019Jan 24, 201901/24/19The C++ Core Guidelines’ Lifetime Profile, which is part of the C++ Core Guidelines, aims to detect lifetime problems, like dangling pointers and references, in C++ code. It uses the type information already present in the source along with some simple contracts between functions to detect defects at compile time with minimal annotation.
December 18, 2018Dec 18, 201812/18/18Visual Studio 2019 Preview 1 introduces an improved debugger for C++ that uses an external 64-bit process for hosting its memory-intensive components. If you’ve experienced memory-related issues while debugging C++ applications before, these issues should now be largely resolved with Visual Studio 2019.
December 14, 2018Dec 14, 201812/14/18Two features available in Visual Studio 2019 Preview 1 for C++ developers are the start window and a revamped new project dialog. The start window moves the core features from the Visual Studio Start Page, which normally appeared in the editor space when Visual Studio is launched, out into a separate window that appears before the IDE launches. The window includes five main sections: Open recent, Clone or checkout code, Open a project or solution, Open a local folder, Create a new project. It is also possible to continue past the window without opening any code by choosing “Continue without code”. Let’s dig into the features of the start window.
December 5, 2018Dec 5, 201812/5/18After reading and writing enough code, you begin to notice certain usage patterns. For example, if a stream is open, it will eventually be closed. More interestingly, if a string is used in the context of an if-statement, it will often be to check if the string is empty or if it has a certain size.
December 4, 2018Dec 4, 201812/4/18C++ developers using Visual Studio 2019 16.0 Preview 1 or Visual Studio Code can now use Live Share. With Live Share you can share the full context of your code, enabling collaborative editing and debugging.
Collaborative Editing:
Collaborative Debugging:
In a Live Share session there is a host and a guest(s).
September 26, 2018Sep 26, 201809/26/18Step Back for C++
In the most recent, 15.9, update to Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise Edition, we’ve added “Step Back” for C++ developers targeting Windows 10 Anniversary Update (1607) and later. With this feature, you can now return to a previous state while debugging without having to restart the entire process.
New User
March 27, 2018Mar 27, 201803/27/18Whether you are creating a new (or modifying an existing) C++ project using a Wizard, or importing an project into Visual Studio from another IDE, it’s important to configure the project correctly for the IntelliSense and Browsing features to provide accurate information.
June 16, 2017Jun 16, 201706/16/17Welcome to the C++ Tutorial.
In this first C++ tutorial, you will learn how to write (and run!) your first C++ program, “Hello, World!”. Along the way you will learn a little C++ history, see how to configure a C++ console application in Visual Studio 2017,
April 14, 2017Apr 14, 201704/14/17C++ has been around for a long time and throughout its history many tools have been built to make life easier for C++ developers. This has led to a diverse C++ ecosystem in terms of the editing tools, build systems,
April 14, 2017Apr 14, 201704/14/17If your project targets one of the Windows platforms only (Desktop or UWP), you should consider using MSBuild as your C++ build system. If you consider expanding beyond these platforms though, consider using CMake to specify your build. To learn more,
April 14, 2017Apr 14, 201704/14/17You can use Visual Studio to develop your C++ projects targeting Android. To learn more about this support read the Visual C++ for Cross-Platform Mobile development section on MSDN.
If you’re currently using Eclipse and considering moving to Visual Studio,
April 14, 2017Apr 14, 201704/14/17Visual Studio supports targeting Linux out of the box – you can edit, remote build and remote debug to a Linux machine (whether that’s a remote machine, a VM running locally or in the cloud, or WSL in Windows 10).
April 14, 2017Apr 14, 201704/14/17Qt framework is an ever growing cross-platform C++ framework, ideal for building desktop, mobile, and even embedded solutions. While you can use CMake to target Qt (if you do, you should read more about the Visual Studio support for CMake),
October 5, 2016Oct 5, 201610/5/16⏱ Updated on October 5, 2017 with the latest functionality included with Visual Studio 2017 15.4
Visual Studio 2017 introduces built-in support for handling CMake projects. This makes it a lot simpler to develop C++ projects built with CMake without the need to generate VS projects and solutions from the command line.
October 5, 2016Oct 5, 201610/5/16⏱ Updated on March 06, 2017 with the latest functionality in Visual Studio 2017 RTW
Welcome to Visual Studio 2017! Starting with this release, Visual Studio supports opening folders containing source code without the need to create any solutions or projects.
OpenFolder
January 24, 2019Jan 24, 201901/24/19Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 introduces a new CMake Project Settings Editor to help you more easily configure your CMake projects in Visual Studio. The editor provides an alternative to modifying the CMakeSettings.json file directly and allows you to create and manage your CMake configurations.
January 10, 2018Jan 10, 201801/10/18Today’s preview of Visual Studio 2017 version 15.6 Preview 2 includes two IntelliSense improvements to streamline code editing for C++ Open Folder and CMake. We added a new type of IntelliSense squiggle to C++ Open Folder and CMake to streamline cross-platform development.
November 2, 2017Nov 2, 201711/2/17Ever since we shipped support for opening a folder of C++ code, the community has been asking for more control over their build and editing environments. To achieve this, we have added new ways to customize your environment with CppProperties.json in the latest version of Visual Studio 2017.
October 23, 2017Oct 23, 201710/23/17⏱ Updated on January 10, 2018 to cover addition of debugging support in Visual Studio 2017 15.6
In Visual Studio 2017 15.5 we are introduced support for cross compilation targeting ARM microcontrollers.
October 23, 2017Oct 23, 201710/23/17We have introduced a new capability to run remote tasks in Visual Studio 2017 15.5 Preview 2. This capability allows you to run any command on a remote system that is defined in Visual Studio’s Connection Manager.
September 14, 2017Sep 14, 201709/14/17Visual Studio 2017 15.4 Preview 2 is now available and includes enhancements to Visual Studio’s CMake tools. The latest preview upgrades CMake to version 3.9, includes better support for independent CMakeLists, and supports targeting Linux directly.
July 19, 2017Jul 19, 201707/19/17Building cross-platform C and C++ code is easier than ever with Visual Studio 15.3 Preview 4. The latest preview improves support for alternative compilers and build environments such as MinGW and Cygwin. MinGW (Minimalist GNU for Windows),
April 14, 2017Apr 14, 201704/14/17C++ has been around for a long time and throughout its history many tools have been built to make life easier for C++ developers. This has led to a diverse C++ ecosystem in terms of the editing tools, build systems,
November 16, 2016Nov 16, 201611/16/16With the Visual Studio 2017 RC release, we’re continuing to improve the “Open Folder” capabilities for C++ source code. In this release, we’re adding support for building as well as easier configuration for the debugger and the C++ language services.
October 5, 2016Oct 5, 201610/5/16⏱ Updated on March 06, 2017 with the latest functionality in Visual Studio 2017 RTW
Welcome to Visual Studio 2017! Starting with this release, Visual Studio supports opening folders containing source code without the need to create any solutions or projects.
performance
March 19, 2019Mar 19, 201903/19/19The C++ compiler in Visual Studio 2019 includes several new optimizations and improvements geared towards increasing the performance of games and making game developers more productive by reducing the compilation time of large projects. Although the focus of this blog post is on the game industry,
January 4, 2018Jan 4, 201801/4/18As C++ programs get larger and larger and the optimizer becomes more complex the compiler’s build time, or throughput, increasingly comes into focus. It’s something that needs to be continually addressed as new patterns emerge and take hold (such as “unity”
December 3, 2017Dec 3, 201712/3/17In this post, we’d like to give you an update on the significant progress the Visual C++ code optimizer made in the past year, focused mostly on the features released in the 15.3 and 15.5 versions. Compared to VS2015 Update 3,
October 5, 2016Oct 5, 201610/5/16Continuing with our goal of further improving developer productivity with Visual Studio 2017 there have been major investments made for also improving incremental developer builds. The developer incremental build is one where a developer changes a single or multiple source files and builds.
October 5, 2016Oct 5, 201610/5/16The Visual C++ product has had projects ever since its inception. Visual C++ had its own IDE up through Visual Studio 6. Starting in Visual Studio .NET, C++ moved to a new IDE shared by Visual Basic, C#, C++, and other tools.
Survey
June 7, 2018Jun 7, 201806/7/18The Spring 2018 Visual C++ Migration Survey is now open.
Please take a few minutes to share your experiences, positive or not so positive. If you have not migrated your solutions and project to Visual Studio 2017, please let us know why.
January 11, 2017Jan 11, 201701/11/17vcpkg, a tool to acquire and build C++ open source libraries on Windows, was published 3 months ago. We started with 20 libraries and now the C++ community has added 121 new C++ libraries. We really appreciate your feedback and we created a survey to collect it.
September 27, 2016Sep 27, 201609/27/16We’d love to hear more about what you would like to see in C++ code analysis. We’re running a short survey–just 20 questions–to help us understand how to make C++ code analysis and Visual C++ better.
Please take a couple of minutes to fill out our C++ Code Analysis survey and let us know your thoughts.
July 14, 2016Jul 14, 201607/14/16Hi everyone! The Visual Studio C++ team is conducting a survey to learn more about your C++ unit testing experiences. We’ll use the feedback to make improvements to Visual Studio in the future. The survey should take less than 10 minutes to complete.
June 7, 2016Jun 7, 201606/7/16Updated 6/14/2016: We updated the original announcement post with the content below if you want a single page that covers everything about this extension. The below remains the same and just covers the updates from the original release.
February 12, 2016Feb 12, 201602/12/16Or have you worked on a game recently?
If so, please share some details about your experience. The Microsoft Visual Studio team would like to learn more about your current game development experience. The survey should take less than ~10 minutes.
Uncategorized
February 6, 2019Feb 6, 201902/6/19This post builds on using multi-stage containers for C++ development. That post showed how to use a single Dockerfile to describe a build stage and a deployment stage resulting in a container optimized for deployment. It did not show you how to use a containers with your development environment.
February 1, 2019Feb 1, 201902/1/19We have made a bunch of improvements to Visual Studio’s CMake support in the latest preview of the IDE. Many of these changes are taking the first steps to close the gap between working with solutions generated by CMake and the IDE’s native support.
December 5, 2018Dec 5, 201812/5/18The October 2018 update of the Visual Studio Code C++ extension has recently shipped. It comes with a ton of bug fixes, improved Go to Definition support, integrated terminal support when debugging, and a simpler way to opt into our extension’s Insiders program.
November 27, 2018Nov 27, 201811/27/18This post is part of a regular series of posts where the C++ product team and other guests answer questions we have received from customers. The questions can be about anything C++ related: MSVC toolset, the standard language and library,
August 29, 2018Aug 29, 201808/29/18This post is part of a regular series of posts where the C++ product team here at Microsoft and other guests answer questions we have received from customers. The questions can be about anything C++ related: Visual C++, the standard language and library,
August 21, 2018Aug 21, 201808/21/18Visual Studio 2017 contains support for std::string_view, a type added in C++17 to serve some of the roles previously served by const char * and const std::string& parameters. string_view is neither a “better const std::string&”, nor “better const char *”;
July 2, 2018Jul 2, 201807/2/18This post was written by Olga Arkhipova.
Many big codebases use so-called unity (jumbo) builds where many source files are included in one or a few ‘unity’ files for compilation, which makes compiling and linking much faster.
June 29, 2018Jun 29, 201806/29/18In Visual Studio 2017 release 15.8 Preview 3 we’re announcing support for Just My Code stepping for C++. In addition to previously supported callstack filtering, the Visual Studio debugger now also supports stepping over non-user-code. As you “Step In”,
June 26, 2018Jun 26, 201806/26/18The Visual C++ team has been working to refresh our code analysis experience inside Visual Studio. We’re aiming to make these tools both more useful and natural to use and hope that they’ll benefit you no matter your workflow, style,
June 26, 2018Jun 26, 201806/26/18Visual Studio 2017 version 15.8 is currently available in preview. Today, Preview 3 has been released, and it comes with several features that improve the developer productivity experience. One key theme in 15.8 is code modernization, and macros are a key target for that.
VC++ Migration Documentation
March 7, 2017Mar 7, 201703/7/17Visual Studio 2017 is a major leap forward in terms of C++ functionality compared with VS 2015. We hope the new release will delight you in your day-to-day job as soon as you can upgrade.
This blog post focuses on the steps needed to upgrade from Visual Studio 2015 to 2017.
September 19, 2016Sep 19, 201609/19/16Upgrading to the latest C++ compiler and toolset is sometimes not so easy and can be time consuming. You are likely to encounter some compiler and linker errors and warnings in code that previously compiled cleanly. There are several possible sources for these errors,
February 24, 2016Feb 24, 201602/24/16⏱ Updated on March 11, 2019 with the latest functionality in Visual Studio 2017
Are you currently developing your C++ projects in an older version of Visual Studio? If your reasons for avoiding the all-new features in VS 2017 are covered next,
Vcpkg
December 13, 2018Dec 13, 201812/13/18Containers are a great tool for configuring reproducible build environments. It’s fairly easy to find Dockerfiles that provide various C++ environments. Unfortunately, it is hard to find guidance on how to use newer techniques like multi-stage builds. This post will show you how you can leverage the capabilities of multi-stage containers for your C++ development.
August 30, 2018Aug 30, 201808/30/18We would like to share a progress update to our previous announcement regarding enabling Boost.Hana with MSVC compiler. Just as a quick background, Louis Dionne, the Boost.Hana author, and us have jointly agreed to provide a version of Boost.Hana in vcpkg to promote usage of the library among more C++ users from the Visual C++ community.
June 4, 2018Jun 4, 201806/4/18Overview
As we continue to work towards improving the conformance of the MSVC compiler for the C++ community, we would like to enable more C++ libraries, and today we are bringing Boost.Hana to Visual C++. Building on our recent C++ conformance progress,
April 24, 2018Apr 24, 201804/24/18At Microsoft, the core of our vision is “Any Developer, Any App, Any Platform” and we are committed to bringing you the most productive development tools and services to build your apps across all platforms. With this in mind, we are thrilled to announce today the availability of vcpkg on Linux and MacOS.
February 6, 2018Feb 6, 201802/6/18We are happy to announce a new feature for vcpkg in version 0.0.103: Feature Packages.
Vcpkg is a package manager to help acquiring and building open source libraries on Windows; vcpkg currently offers over 600 C++ libraries available for VS2017 and VS2015.
January 16, 2018Jan 16, 201801/16/18If you’re just getting started and want to learn more about vcpkg, check out our initial post.
We recently added a new option to vcpkg (i.e. vcpkg contact –survey) to provide a direct way to share your feedback with the Vcpkg team.
October 23, 2017Oct 23, 201710/23/17Vcpkg allows you to acquire and build 3rd party libraries on Windows. Once cloned, the vcpkg directory (enlistment) provides a stable set of libraries that are all compatible and based on the latest published version of these libraries.
May 3, 2017May 3, 201705/3/17Vcpkg helps you acquire and build open source libraries on Windows. Since September 2016, the community added more than 200 libraries in the vcpkg catalog and has been contributing actively to the code itself. Vcpkg now supports Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio 2017 and can target dynamic or static libraries and platforms like x64,
March 7, 2017Mar 7, 201703/7/17Visual Studio 2017 is a major leap forward in terms of C++ functionality compared with VS 2015. We hope the new release will delight you in your day-to-day job as soon as you can upgrade.
This blog post focuses on the steps needed to upgrade from Visual Studio 2015 to 2017.
February 14, 2017Feb 14, 201702/14/17Vcpkg simplifies acquiring and building open source libraries on Windows. Since our first release we have continually improved the tool by fixing issues and adding features. The latest version of the tool is 0.0.71, here is a summary of the changes in this version:
Visual Studio Code
January 31, 2019Jan 31, 201901/31/19The January 2019 update of the Visual Studio Code C++ extension is now available. This release includes many new features and bug fixes including documentation comments support, improved #include autocomplete performance, better member function completion, and many IntelliSense bug fixes.
August 23, 2018Aug 23, 201808/23/18Late last week we shipped the August 2018 update to the C/C++ extension for Visual Studio Code. This update included support for “Just My Code” symbol search, a gcc-x64 option in the intelliSenseMode setting, and many bug fixes.
August 14, 2018Aug 14, 201808/14/18Containers allow developers to package up an application with all the parts it needs, such as libraries and other dependencies, and ship it all out as one image. This is especially useful for C++ cross-platform development – with containers you can choose to target a platform that runs on a completely different operating system than your developer machine.
July 25, 2018Jul 25, 201807/25/18Last week we shipped the July 2018 update to the C/C++ extension for Visual Studio Code. In this update we added support for a new experimental API that allows build system extensions to pass IntelliSense configuration information to our extension for powering up full IntelliSense experience.
June 21, 2018Jun 21, 201806/21/18Visual Studio Code C/C++ extension June 2018 Update
Today we’re very happy to announce the availability of the June 2018 update to the C/C++ extension for Visual Studio Code! In this update, we are continuing our efforts to make IntelliSense configuration easier by auto-detecting compile_commands.json files for IntelliSense,
May 8, 2018May 8, 201805/8/18Visual Studio Code C/C++ extension May 2018 Update – IntelliSense configuration just got so much easier!
This morning we shipped the May 2018 update of the C/C++ extension for Visual Studio Code, the most significant update to this extension in its 2-year history!
March 29, 2018Mar 29, 201803/29/18Today we are excited to announce the March 2018 update to the Visual Studio Code C/C++ extension! This update includes improved auto-complete for local and global scopes and a simplified configuration process for system includes and defines,
February 20, 2018Feb 20, 201802/20/18The February 2018 update to the Visual Studio Code C/C++ extension is here! In addition to several bug fixes, this update added colorization for inactive code regions, making it easy to read C and C++ code.
January 17, 2018Jan 17, 201801/17/18Today we are shipping the first update of the year to the Visual Studio Code C/C++ extension! This update includes IntelliSense and code navigation performance improvements and a CPU Usage setting for the tag parser to specify the CPU resources to be used.
December 11, 2017Dec 11, 201712/11/17Happy holidays! Today we’re shipping the December 2017 update to the Visual Studio Code C/C++ extension – our last major update of this year, with out-of-box support for more Linux distros and built-in guidance on how to configure for a better IntelliSense experience.
Writing Code
September 4, 2018Sep 4, 201809/4/18This post is part of a regular series of posts where the C++ product team here at Microsoft and other guests answer questions we have received from customers. The questions can be about anything C++ related: MSVC toolset, the standard language and library,
March 22, 2018Mar 22, 201803/22/18This post was written by Sergiy Oryekhov.
The C++ Core Guidelines Check extension received several new rules in Visual Studio 2017 15.7 Preview 2. The primary focus in this iteration was on the checks that would make it easier to adopt utilities from the Guidelines Support Library.
March 13, 2018Mar 13, 201803/13/18We’re making it easier to configure and use the C++ code analysis features with a set of changes targeting 15.7. In the first 15.7 preview we’ve cleaned up the UI, fixed our documentation links and,
February 23, 2018Feb 23, 201802/23/18We’ve improved the C++ Code Analysis toolset with every major compiler update in Visual Studio 2017. Version 15.6, now in Preview, includes a set of arithmetic overflow checks. This article discusses those checks and why you’ll want to enable them in your code.
July 21, 2017Jul 21, 201707/21/17This post as well as described diagnostics significantly benefited from the feedback by Mark, Xiang, Stephan, Marian, Gabriel, Ulzii, Steve and Andrew.
Visual Studio 2017 15.3.0 release comes with a number of improvements to the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler’s diagnostics.
October 24, 2016Oct 24, 201610/24/16Over the last few months, we have heard a lot of requests with respect to adding capability to Visual Studio Code to allow developers to build their C/C++ application. The task extensibility in Visual Studio Code exists to automate tasks like building,
