Showing archive results for 2017

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...

If you’re targeting iOS and writing a lot of C++ code, you should consider importing your XCode projects inside Visual Studio. Visual Studio not only provides an easy way to import these projects, but also allows opening these projects back in XCode if you need to make non-C++ related edits (e.g. storyboarding, UI design). This article covers the ...

You 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, you can do that via our Eclipse Android Project Import Wizard. You can read about other C++ ...

Visual 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). This article covers the high-level steps to bring your existing Linux projects to Visual Studio. You can read about other C++ project...

Qt 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), Qt also provides its own Qt-optimized build system called qmake. If your project is using qmake, this articl...

Leverage the full power of C++ to build high-end games powered by DirectX to run on a variety of devices in the Windows family, including desktops, tablets, and phones. In this blog post we will dive into DirectX development with C++ in Visual Studio. First we'll look at how to acquire the tools needed for DirectX desktop and Universal Windows Plat...

This post was updated on December 11, 2020 Visual Studio 2017 introduced the Linux Development with C++ workload. We generally recommend Visual Studio’s native support for CMake for all C++ Linux development. Visual Studio’s CMake support allows you to target multiple platforms (Windows, a remote Linux system, the Windows Subsystem for Linux, em...

Debugging is one of the cornerstones of software development, and it can consume a significant portion of a developer’s day.  The Visual Studio native debugger provides a powerful and feature-rich experience for finding and fixing problems that arise in your applications, no matter the type of problem or how difficult it is to solve.  In fact, ther...