C++ Team Blog

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

Support Policy for ATL Server Library

Recently the VC++ team released ATL Server as a shared source library on Codeplex.com  to allow its user community to enhance the library in different directions and at a faster pace than we are able to support. Since then we have received some questions about how this impacts the support policy for ATL Server. The impact of releasing ATL...

Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas) Beta 2 Now Available!

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (codename "Orcas") Beta 2 is now available for download.  We encourage you to download and try this early release. As the goal of this preview is to gather feedback from the developer community, please use Microsoft Connect to report any issues, or to suggest improvements.  You can use the VC++ Orcas ...

Class Designer Needs Your Feedback!

Dear all, Class Designer is a tool in Visual Studio which enables visualization of class structures, class building and refactoring. It uses a diagramming notation that is loosely based on the UML Class Diagram standard, but presents specific language terminology. Class Designer was first introduced in Visual Studio 2005, with support for...

Visual C++ has left the building (well a couple of us will)

Hello   Getting out of the office and meeting customers in their own surroundings is something we are always extremely eager to do. Along these lines, Jonathan Caves, Boris Jabes and myself will be heading to Israel at the end of the month for a couple of events being organized by Yosi and other team members in the local subsidiary. Here...

Testing the IntelliSense engine

Hi, I am James Wang, an SDET on the VC++ Compiler Front End team. Currently, I am working on designing the test architecture for the new IntelliSense engine. I am responsible to design tests that make sure the IntelliSense engine gives correct answer for quick info, member list, parameter help, and etc. Currently we have a test suite that ...

Fixing "Unsatisfied forward declaration" error from MIDL

Earlier this week I was helping a customer port some code from Visual Studio 2005 to a beta build of Orcas when we noticed an interesting change of behavior in how the new version of midl.exe (from the Windows Vista SDK release) was parsing code.  In case you run into the issue, here's a brief description, along with what we did to work ...

Fuzz Testing

Hello. My name is Pengpeng Wang, a new VC++ IDE QA member. I joined Microsoft and the VC++ IDE team just a little over four months ago. These four months have been quite an experience for me. It still seems like yesterday that I was struggling with my first .NET “hello world” assignment. My mentor, Alvin (yes the Alvin Chardon guy ...

Fixing COM Interface Redefinition Error

Hello my name is Steven Toscano and I work on the Visual C++ IDE team.  Recently we had a customer visit that exposed a common problem people are seeing when migrating to VS2005 from older versions of VS. You will encounter this problem if you have defined an interface with the same name as one of the interfaces introduced in the ...

Testing VCRedist

Hi everyone,My name is Rob Huyett, and I’m an SDET on the Visual C++ Libraries team.  I’ve been here at Microsoft for just a little over a year.  One of my recurring duties here is to test VCRedist in its various forms.VCRedist (just in case you aren’t already familiar with the term) refers to the process of ...