The final release of the Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack is now available for download.  This release provides several exciting features for C++ developers, such as a major update to MFC and an implementation of TR1.  These features are fully covered under Microsoft’s standard support policies.   The Feature Pack is available...

The March 2008 issue of MSDN Magazine includes a nice article about protecting your C/C++ programs. You can check out the article at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc337897.aspx.Thanks,Visual C++ Team

In Visual Studio 2008 we introduced a useful, but not very well known, feature in the Native Debugger for visualizing enum bit flags. Consider the following code: enum x { bit_none = 0,       bit1 = 1,       bit2 = (1 << 1),       bit3 = (1 << 2),...

My name is Martha Wieczorek and I’m a Software Design Engineer in Test on the Visual C++ IDE team. I would like to share with you some different testing approaches that we use on the team and talk about the advantages/disadvantages of each approach based on my experience. Testing effectively and efficiently becomes more and more challeng...

Hi, Jim Springfield again.  This post covers our current work to fundamentally change how we implement Intellisense and code browsing for C++ in Visual Studio 10.  I previously covered the history of Intellisense and outlined many of the problems that we face.  See here http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2007/12/18/intellisense-his...

Hello Recently we shipped a beta of our MFC/TR1 Feature Pack that, naturally enough, included a large update to MFC and an implementation of “TR1” (if you are unsure just what exactly TR1 is then you can read this VC Blog post.). To celebrate the TR1 availability, Charles Torre (Channel 9) visited with Stephan T. Lavavej, our STL/T...

Hi, I'm Stephan, the Visual C++ Libraries Developer working on TR1.   Recently, I gave 3 presentations within Microsoft about the most novel components of TR1: shared_ptr, regex, and the additions to <functional> (including mem_fn(), bind(), and tr1::function).  These presentations explained where to use, how to use, and how to avo...

My name is Bogdan Mihalcea and I’m a developer in VC++ Development Team. For the last three years in the team I worked in almost all the areas of IDE (Intellisense, Project System, Resource Editor, Debugger). Recently we were engaged in fixing various bugs in our product for VS9 SP1. In multiple instances we were facing similar bugs that can ...

One thing that continues to amaze me are the powerful tools available to developers and QA nowadays. Application performance can be improved through profiling and optimization tools operating statically and/or dynamically on the binary (using PGO for example).   Testing metrics become more accurate when using instrumentation and code cove...

Happy New Year! My name is Li Shao. I am a Software Design Engineer in Test in the Visual C++ IDE team.  In this blog entry, I would like to share with you some information about the recruiting event that I attended last fall. About 3 month ago, I attended Microsoft TechFest ’07 held in three Southern California Universities: University...