If you regularly follow our blog, you may have noticed that our posts encourage you to submit your suggestions on how to improve Visual Studio in UserVoice. We spend a lot of time reviewing your suggestions and incorporating them into our planning for future releases. In this post, we'd like to give you an update on what suggestions we have recent...

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...

Visual 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. As promised in our BUILD 2016 talk "6 reasons to move your C++ code to Vis...

February 26th marks the 25th anniversary for the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC). Join us in wishing MFC a big Happy Birthday! MFC saw the light of day on February 26th 1992 and it has been a very large part of the Microsoft C++ legacy ever since. While Visual C++ 1.0 would only ship one year later (with MFC 2.0), in 1992 MFC 1.0 was laying t...

In case you missed the latest Visual Studio news, there is a new update for Visual Studio 2017 RC available. You can either upgrade your existing installation or, if you’re starting fresh, install it from the Visual Studio 2017 RC download page. This release comes with several enhancements in Visual Studio’s CMake experience that further simplify t...