C++ Team Blog

The latest in C++, Visual Studio, VS Code, and vcpkg from the MSFT C++ team

Serial and Zephyr support for Visual Studio and VS Code

We are continuing to improve our embedded development support in Visual Studio and VS Code. We have recently introduced a serial monitor and RTOS support for Zephyr. These capabilities are present in Visual Studio 17.3 Preview 1 as part of the Linux and embedded development workload. The Embedded Tools extension for VS Code also includes these...

Embedded Software Development in Visual Studio

In this post we will walk you through Visual Studio installation of the embedded workload, how to acquire embedded tool dependencies with vcpkg, then demonstrate edit, build, deploy, and debugging directly in Visual Studio with new peripheral register and RTOS object views. We will demonstrate all of this with an Azure RTOS ThreadX project.

Bootstrap your dev environment with vcpkg artifacts

Updated May 11, 2022: Using your own registry section revised to reflect metadata format changes. We are happy to announce a new experience for acquiring artifacts using vcpkg. We define an artifact as a set of packages required for a working development environment. Examples of relevant packages include compilers, linkers, debuggers, build...

New Safety Rules in C++ Code Analysis

In Visual Studio version 16.8 Preview 3,  we are adding a few safety rules to C++ Code Analysis that can find some common mistakes, which can lead to bugs ranging from simple broken features to costly security vulnerabilities. These new rules are developed around issues discovered in production software via security reviews and...

Initial Support For C++20 Ranges 

We are happy to announce that Visual Studio 2019 version 16.6 contains the first user-visible pieces of C++20 Ranges support. We’ve been working on support machinery for a few releases now, but in this release the tip of the iceberg has finally broken the surface of the water and there are now some tools available for users. The ...

Visual Studio Code C++ extension: May 2020 update

The May 2020 update of the Visual Studio Code C++ extension is now available. This latest release offers brand new features—ARM and ARM64 IntelliSense modes and C++ language-specific code folding—along with a bunch of enhancements and bug fixes. To find out more about all the changes, check out our release notes on GitHub. ARM and ARM64 ...

AVX-512 Auto-Vectorization in MSVC

In Visual Studio 2019 version 16.3 we added AVX-512 support to the auto-vectorizer of the MSVC compiler. This post will show some examples and help you enable it in your projects. What is the auto vectorizer? The compiler’s auto vectorizer analyzes loops in the user’s source code and generates vectorized code for a vectorization target ...