C++ Team Blog
The latest in C++, Visual Studio, VS Code, and vcpkg from the MSFT C++ team
Latest posts
Weathr, a 3D Weather App now on CodePlex
Welcome to 2014. May all your C++ code run perfectly! Thomas Petchel wanted really to explore the intersection among C++, DirectX, and XAML in the context of a Windows Store app. The result? Weathr, a 3D weather app for windows 8.1. It is a smooth, responsive app that shows weather information for different locations. To run it, you need Windows 8.1, Visual Studio 2013 (grab Visual Studio Express 2013), a Bing Maps API key (grab a trial key) and a World Weather Online API Key (grab a trial key). Open Visual Studio and add your keys to ServiceKeys.h and you are good to go. The app includes full source code a...
Asynchronous programming in C++ using resumable functions and await
As you know we recently released the Visual C++ Compiler November 2013 CTP. One of the many features in this CTP is the support for resumable functions and await. In this blog post, I want to touch upon some examples where these features make the experience of programming with asynchronous API much simpler. Example 1 The first example we are going to look at is the official File picker sample for Windows 8.1. If you open the solution for this sample using Visual Studio 2013, build and run, you will see an app like the below. Selecting Option 4 in this sample brings up the file picker dialog which allows you to ...
Developer Activities Survey Results Overview
Hi there! A few months ago, some of you took a survey on C++ developer activities, the results of which will be used to hone in on which areas to improve for the next release of Visual Studio. I wanted to take some time to share with you the preliminary results of the survey. Without further ado, out of the 47 tasks included on the survey, here's what we found out! "Aggregate Score" is the composite score from all respondents. "Normalized Score" is adjusted by the number of respondents for which the activity is meaningful for them. Survey says, normalized or not, these tasks are the most often performed by C++ d...
Performance++ with Visual C++ 2013
For Visual Studio 2013 we have continued to improve the analysis performed by the Visual C++ compiler so it can produce code that runs faster than before. In this blog we highlight some of the many improvements that Visual Studio 2013 has in store for you. This blog is intended to provide you an overview on all the goodies we have added recently which will help make your code run faster. We have bucketed these improvements into a couple primary scenarios enlisted below, but before we get started let us take a recap of existing performance. Recap of free performance The Visual C++ Compiler offers many optimizati...
Visual C++ in 2013 and Beyond – Q&A
Did you watch Charles Torre's discussion with Ale Contenti, Tarek Madkour and Herb Sutter at the Visual Studio 2013 Virtual Launch last month? The team answered a number of questions from Charles and the community on topics ranging from refactoring to PEX. In case you missed the video (or missed some of the answers), the questions and answers are provided below.Note that the questions and answers were often tweaked for clarity, correctness and completeness. This is not a transcript. If you have follow up questions, lob them our way in the comments section.Thanks!How easy is it to migrate C++ assets to Visual Stud...
C++11/14 Core Language Features in VS 2013 and the Nov 2013 CTP
C++ AMP to target Khronos SPIR and HSAIL
The Parallel Programming in Native Code blog recently announced Clang support for C++ AMP via LLVM backend. This is a key milestone in our commitment (as mentioned in Somasegar's blog) to share the C++ AMP specification to all C++ developers, regardless of whether they're using Visual C++ or not. Portability across hardware and platforms is one of the cornerstones for C++ AMP and we are happy to see that with this project, C++ AMP will become the high level language with multiple underlying implementations including DirectCompute, Khronos SPIR 1.2 for OpenCL and HSAIL.AMD is planning to release this project in Ma...
Visual Studio Rename Refactor Helper for Visual Studio 2013
The C++ language is large and complex with context-sensitive syntax subtleties that make it difficult to create a reliable and fast rename refactoring tool. For years we wanted to include rename refactoring in Visual C++ but it never quite made it. We were concerned about scalability, performance and accuracy for different user scenarios. Rename refactoring might take longer on more complex or larger projects. Recently, we decided to give it a try. The result is the Rename Refactor Helper for Visual Studio 2013 (see the announcement on Channel 9 / Going Native). Once installed, you can easily right click on a ...
Announcing the Visual C++ Compiler November 2013 CTP
Last year in November, we released an out-of-band customer technology preview (CTP) of the Visual C++ compiler. It contained preview versions of C++11 features which we subsequently fully released in Visual Studio 2012. At that time, and at GoingNative 2013 this year, we promised to keep releasing these CTPs to show our progress towards full C++11 and C++14 standards conformance. Today, we are happy to update the map: Today, we deliver on that promise. Download the November 2013 CTP of the Visual C++ Compiler now. Breaking changes can be found here. It contains the following C++11, C++14, and C++/CX ...