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++ 2021 is Today

May 3rd, 2021
(image) Pure Virtual C++, a free one-day virtual conference for the whole C++ community, is starting today (May 3rd) at 14:30 UTC. You can watch it and interact with the speakers at Learn TV. There'll be sessions on C++20 modules, CMake, vcpkg, and code analysis. All of our pre-conference demos, including what's new in C++20 support in ...

Pure Virtual C++ 2021 Schedule Available

April 20th, 2021
The schedule for Pure Virtual C++ 2021 is now live on the event website. Remember to sign up to be the first to access our extra on-demand C++ demos and get more virtual surprises. Schedule All times are on Monday 3rd May 2021 UTC. Abstracts and speaker bios are available on the website...

Sign Up for the Pure Virtual C++ 2021 Conference

April 6th, 2021
(image) Last year we ran the first Pure Virtual C++, a free one-day virtual conference for the whole C++ community. This May we're doing it again! Sign-up for free on the website to be the first to hear about our program schedule, access our extra on-demand C++ demos, and get more virtual surprises. The live event will run May 3rd 14:30...

Abbreviated Function Templates and Constrained Auto

February 4th, 2021
Declaring function templates in C++ has always been quite verbose. C++20 added a new way of doing so that is more terse and more consistent with lambdas: abbreviated function templates. This short post will show how to use this syntax and how it applies to C++20 concepts. Abbreviated Function Templates C++11 introduced lambdas, which look ...

A Year of Conference Talks from the Microsoft C++ Team

January 25th, 2021
As we learned to adapt to virtual conferences last year we presented more than 20 talks on a wide range of topics. I've collected them all here so you can easily learn about the latest advances in our tooling as well as the cutting edge of C++ features. C++ Europe (February) WSLConf (March) Pure Virtual C++ (April...

Conditionally Trivial Special Member Functions

November 20th, 2020
The C++ standards committee is currently focusing on adding features to the language which can simplify code. One small example of this in C++20 is conditionally trivial special member functions, which we added support for in Visual Studio 2019 version 16.8. Its benefit isn’t immediately obvious unless you’ve been deep down the rabbit hole...

A Multitude of Updates in Visual Studio 2019 version 16.8 Preview 3

September 14th, 2020
Visual Studio 2019 version 16.8 Preview 3 comes with a huge collection of updates for C++ programmers. Download today to try out new additions in conformance, performance, and productivity. C++20 We’ve improved support for major C++20 features across our compiler, standard library, and IDE. You can now use Modules, Concepts, Coroutines, ...

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 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:  If we attempt to write a new class which derives from `derived` then we get a compiler error:  The specifier is useful for expressing to readers of the code that a class is not to...