Sy Brand

C++ Developer Advocate, C++ Team

Sy Brand is Microsoft’s C++ Developer Advocate. Their background is in compilers and debuggers for embedded accelerators, but they’re also interested in generic library design, metaprogramming, functional-style C++, undefined behaviour, and making our communities more inclusive and welcoming.

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Pure Virtual C++ Conference 2020 Videos and Survey Available

May 6th, 2020
The videos of all Pure Virtual C++ 2020 sessions are now available on YouTube. If you attended the conference, we'd love to hear your feedback. Please fill in our survey so we know what to improve if we run another similar event in the future...

Sign Up For Pure Virtual C++ Conference 2020

April 16th, 2020
Pure Virtual C++ 2020 is a free single-track one-day virtual conference for the whole C++ community. It is taking place on Thursday 30th April 2020 from 14:30 to 23:00 UTC. Sign up on the event website. All talks will be pre-recorded and streamed on YouTube Live with a live Q&A session with the speakers. After the event, the talks will ...

The Performance Benefits of Final Classes

March 2nd, 2020
The final specifier in C++ marks a class or virtual member function as one which cannot be derived from or overriden. For example, consider the following code:   struct base {    virtual void f() const = 0;  };    struct derived final : base {    void f() const override {}  }; If we attempt to write a new class which derives ...

Microsoft C++ Team At CppCon 2019: Videos Available

October 30th, 2019
Last month a large contingent from the Microsoft C++ team attended CppCon. We gave fourteen presentations covering our tools, developments in the standard, concepts which underlie the work we do, and more. We also recorded an episode of CppCast with Microsoft MVPs Rob Irving and Jason Turner. You can hear more about the Open Sourcing of ...

C++20’s Conditionally Explicit Constructors

October 1st, 2019
explicit(bool) is a C++20 feature for simplifying the implementation of generic types and improving compile-time performance. In C++ it is common to write and use types which wrap objects of other types. std::pair and std::optional are two examples, but there are plenty of others in the standard library, Boost, and likely your own codebases...

Microsoft C++ Team on CppCast

September 30th, 2019
Today we have a short guest post from Rob Irving, host of CppCast to tell us about an episode he recorded with our team.   During CppCon 2019 the hosts of CppCast had a chance to sit down with Marian Luparu, Sy Brand and Stephan T. Lavavej from Microsoft's C++ team to discuss some of the announcements made by the team at CppCon...

Microsoft C++ Team at CppCon 2019

September 6th, 2019
The Microsoft C++ team will have a booth and many talks covering a wide range of topics at CppCon 2019. Come say hi to our team outside Aurora D and attend our talks to learn what's new in our tooling, dive into new features in the standard, and hear some exciting announcements! We'll also be running a survey on the C++ ecosystem and ...

Cppp 2019 Trip Report

June 25th, 2019
Summary CPPP is a new C++ conference in Paris, France. Its first iteration ran for a single day with three parallel tracks, drawing in 160 attendees. The conference great on all fronts: the speakers & talks were varied and high-quality, the venue was right next to the Eiffel Tower and had plenty of space, the food was tasty and ...

Clear, Functional C++ Documentation with Sphinx + Breathe + Doxygen + CMake

June 3rd, 2019
Writing good documentation is hard. Tools can’t solve this problem in themselves, but they can ease the pain. This post will show you how to use Sphinx to generate attractive, functional documentation for C++ libraries, supplied with information from Doxygen. We’ll also integrate this process into a CMake build system so that we have a ...

Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 Blog Rollup

February 15th, 2019
Visual 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. What’s New in CMake C++ Binary Compatibility and Pain-Free Upgrades New Code Analysis Checks – use-after move and ...