February 2014

AVX2 Support in Visual Studio C++ Compiler

February 28, 2014 Feb 28, 2014 02/28/14

Jim Hogg

AVX2 is yet another extension to the venerable x86 line of processors, doubling the width of its SIMD vector registers to 256 bits, and adding dozens of new instructions. AVX2 shipped with Intel's latest processor micro-architecture, codenamed "Haswell". (Its official name is "4th generation Intel® Core™ ...

Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 CTP2

February 25, 2014 Feb 25, 2014 02/25/14

Eric Battalio

Today, we have released Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 CTP2, a go-live Team Foundation Server 2013 RC and TypeScript 1.0 RC. This update release preview includes several significant feature additions as well as fixes. You can see full details in the release notes.But you don't have to take my word for it. Check out these posts: On the Visual ...

Why C++?

February 21, 2014 Feb 21, 2014 02/21/14

Eric Battalio

A few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to share a few scenarios where C++ really matters to an internal audience from the field. No demo code or sample projects were reviewed, just the scenarios and first-hand examples.Why C++? Do you agree with these scenarios? Did I miss one? Do you have detailed examples for any of these ...

Winter ISO C++ Meeting Trip Report

February 18, 2014 Feb 18, 2014 02/18/14

Eric Battalio

Herb Sutter posted highlights from the Winter ISO C++ meeting held last week in sunny Issaquah, WA:The major work of this meeting was to complete processing of the national body comments received in last summer's comment ballot for the upcoming C++14 standard. We also began comment processing for the recent corresponding ballot for the File ...

The Old New C++ Thing

February 14, 2014 Feb 14, 2014 02/14/14

Eric Battalio

I've spent many hours reading articles on Raymond Chen's blog, The Old New Thing. It is one of the most popular blogs on MSDN with content ranging from concerts at the Seattle Symphony to Win32 and marriage and native programming. Included are a number of interesting articles with, on or about C++.Here is a small, curated selection: The...

Ghost of VCBlog Posts Past

February 11, 2014 Feb 11, 2014 02/11/14

Eric Battalio

You don't need to call Ghostbusters. Spend some time (re)reading some great posts from the Visual C++ team blog past. There really are some hidden gems in there! Did your favorite post make this list? If not, share it with us in the comments or recommend new content...

Advanced Developers Conference 2014

February 7, 2014 Feb 7, 2014 02/7/14

Eric Battalio

The Advanced Developers Conference 2014 takes place April 29-30 in Munich. This years sessions will be about modern device apps, debugging, drivers, graphics,cloud services and much more.The conference will host about 200 attendees with a broad range of international speakers including one or two from Microsoft. It is a great conference for ...

Challenge – Vulnerable Code

February 4, 2014 Feb 4, 2014 02/4/14

Eric Battalio

This challenge appeared on an internal alias dedicated to C++. It was issued by Mike Vine, a developer here at Microsoft who agreed to let us share it with the mighty Visual C++ blog readers: This challenge came from me thinking about a simple bug which could be turned into a security vulnerability, so I thought I'd give it a go and try to ...