It’s that time of year again! We are excited to see you all at CppCon this year, where we’ll once again be delivering a variety of presentations, from the latest advancements in debugging technology to extensibility frameworks for AI agents. See the end of this post for a listing of all of the sessions involving Microsoft staff. And yes, there’ll be plenty of information on the freshly announced Visual Studio 2026.

We’ll also have a booth through the first four days of the conference. Come on by and let us know what matters to you or ask any burning questions you may have regarding C++ at Microsoft. We will be well stocked with our most popular swag, so come on by and have a chat with us. There may even be appearances by speakers in case you didn’t get a chance to ask that all important question after their session.

Our annual survey is now open and will be available all week throughout the conference. It’s super lightweight, and upon completion, CppCon attendees will be entered into a raffle for one of four great prizes. You do have to be onsite for the daily drawing to win (see official rules here), but even if you aren’t going to be at the conference, you can still complete the survey to let us know what you think of our C++ products. New this year on the survey is an option to select a dedicated time to talk with Microsoft staff about the topics you care about. So, if you don’t want to lose your voice in a crowded expo hall you can find that right time that fits into your busy schedule.

Try out Visual Studio 2026 Insiders – Get Started Here

Visual Studio 2026 and MSVC Build Tools v14.50 Preview are already available on the Insiders Channel (which replaces the previous Visual Studio 2022 Preview channel), with a Stable Channel going live later in 2025. We want to hear from you at CppCon about your experiences with Visual Studio 2026 Insiders, so give it a spin and come chat with us about your experiences.

Talks from Microsoft employees (and friends)

Monday 15th​

• Building Secure C++ Applications: A Practical End-to-End Approach, by Chandranath Bhattacharyya & Bharat Kumar

Tuesday​ 16th​

• What’s New for Visual Studio Code: CMake Improvements and GitHub Copilot Agents, by Alexandra Kemper
• What’s New in Visual Studio for C++ Developers in 2025, by David Li and Augustin Popa
• Back to Basics: Code Review, by Chandranath Bhattacharyya and Kathleen Baker

​Wednesday 17th

• Connecting C++ Tools to AI Agents Using the Model Context Protocol (MCP), by Ben McMorran
• LLMs in the Trenches: Boosting System Programming with AI, by Ion Todirel
• Welcome to v1.0 of the meta::[[verse]]!, by Inbal Levi
•  C++ Performance Tips: Cutting Down on Unnecessary Objects, by Prithvi Okade and Kathleen Baker

Thursday 18th​​

• MSVC C++ Dynamic Debugging: How We Enabled Full Debuggability of Optimized Code, by Eric Brumer
• It’s Dangerous to Go Alone: A Game Developer Tutorial, by Michael Price

Friday 19th​​

• Reflection-based JSON in C++ at Gigabytes per Second, by Daniel Lemire and Francisco Geiman Thiesen
• Duck-Tape Chronicles: Rust/C++ Interop, by Victor Ciura