Showing results for April 2017 - C++ Team Blog

Earlier today we shipped the April 2017 update to the C/C++ extension for Visual Studio Code. We are excited to introduce the following new features in this update: The original blog post has been updated with these changes. If you have this extension installed already, Visual Studio Code sends a notification for the update and instal...

Are you new to Visual Studio and working with C++? Then you’ve come to the right place. Whether you’re a student writing one of your first programs or a seasoned C++ developer with years of experience, you'll find Visual Studio to be a powerful environment for C++ development. Visual Studio is an IDE packed with features, from code browsing, colori...

Visual Studio comes packed with a set of productivity tools to make it easy for C++ developers to read, edit, and navigate through their code. In this blog post we will dive into these features and go over what they do. This post is part of a series aimed at new users to Visual Studio. This blog post goes over the following concepts: ...

Testing is an increasingly important part of a software development workflow. In many cases, it is insufficient to test a program simply by running it and trying it out – as the scope of the project gets more involved, it becomes increasingly necessary to be able to test individual components of the code on a structured basis. If you’re a C++ devel...

When it comes to building mobile applications, many developers write most or a part of the apps in C++. Why? Those who are building computationally intensive apps such as games and physics simulations choose C++ for its unparalleled performance, and the others choose C++ for its cross-platform nature and the ability to leverage existing C/C++ libra...

Today’s preview release of Visual Studio 2017 15.2 update comes with several improvements and new features in CMake Tools for Visual Studio – recently updated to cover 15.2.  We have upgraded the included version of CMake to 3.7.2 and enhanced the discoverability of features in the CMake menu.  This update also includes bugfixes for community repor...

Universal Windows Platform (UWP) applications utilize a new Windows API and app model that creates a single output binary that can feasibly run on any Windows 10 device, ranging from desktops to HoloLens.  Because a app can run on a wide variety of devices with different form factors and types of input, you want it to be tailored to each device and...

The Windows desktop platform has long been the most popular platform among C++ application developers.  With C++ and Visual Studio, you use Windows SDKs to target many versions of Windows ranging from Windows XP to Windows 10, which is well over a billion devices.  Popular desktop applications like Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, and Google...

C++ 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, coding conventions, and C++ libraries that we use in our day-to-day work. As a C++ developer, you are probably accustomed to using a v...

If 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, read about the CMake support in Visual Studio. Using MSBuild has the benefit that from a single c...