C++ Team Blog
The latest in C++, Visual Studio, VS Code, and vcpkg from the MSFT C++ team
Latest posts
Using Windows Azure Mobile Services from C++ Windows Store apps
Most good apps these days provide some kind of connected experience whether it is the ability to connect to existing popular web services (like Facebook, Twitter, SkyDrive etc.) or building their own custom backend based somewhere in the cloud. Visual Studio 2013 provides support for both these scenarios for C++ developers. For the former, it contains the C++ REST SDK which ships in the box now in addition to being an open source project. This post however, is focused on the latter scenario – allowing Windows Store app developers to connect to Windows Azure Mobile Services using a set of I...
The Visual C++ Linker best practices: Developer Iteration
The time spent in the link phase could be a significant portion of an applications overall build time for most large projects. A user can quickly determine this by adding the '/time' flag to the linker command line. The 'Final: Total time' reports the total time spent in the link phase. There are essentially two primary scenarios to consider when looking at link time. The first is the developer iteration scenario. In this scenario, the primary objective is to make the cycle from a code change to seeing that change running on the console as quick as possible. Developers are often willing to trade off executable si...
Creating a C++ Project from a PDB file: PDB Project
For the latest information on Version 2.0, check out http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2014/01/15/creating-a-c-project-from-a-pdb-file-pdb-project-version-2.0.aspx.
The *New Performance Optimization Tool* for Visual C++ applications
Introduction As a part of the VS2013 preview release the 'Performance and Diagnostics Hub' was introduced. The Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) tool is a new performance optimization tool that integrates with 'Performance and Diagnostic Hub'. The tool is not a part of the out of the box install of Visual Studio 2013 but can be downloaded and installed from VSGallery (Download here). This tool is for you if care about boosting your application's runtime performance. This tool aims at improving the user experience of carrying out PGO in Visual Studio by providing a guided experience through the various phas...
Visual Studio 2013 Available Now!
We are happy to announce that Visual Studio 2013 is now available. And now—in no particular order—here are the top reasons why C++ developers want Visual Studio 2013:Better C++ language conformance. Support for C++11 began in Visual Studio 2010, which included auto and lambda functions. In Visual Studio 2012, we implemented more of the standard—for example, range-based for loops, standard threads, and futures. Visual Studio 2013 provides even more—variadic templates, delegating constructors, non-static data member initializers, uniform initialization, 'using' aliases, and other feat...
Visual C++ Libraries Survey
The Visual C++ team wants to better understand how you use libraries in your day-to-day development work. Whether you’re publishing libraries, finding libraries that work on the Microsoft platforms for which you’re building your apps, or integrating libraries into your project and build systems, we want to hear from you so we can make the right investments in Visual Studio tooling.Tell us what works, what doesn’t, and what’s the most important change we could make in Visual Studio to improve how you work with C++ libraries. Is there an open source library you feel is missing from your favo...
Friday Videos: Going Native 2013
Going Native 2013 ended a few weeks ago, but the sessions live on in a series of videos on Channel 9. Don't have time for all of them? Here are some of the most-viewed sessions: Which session did you enjoy the most (and why)?
Vector Calling Convention on channel 9
Recently we recorded a session for 'Vector Calling Convention' on Channel 9 , as part of the “Going Native” series. Vector calling convention is a new calling convention (specially for vector types) we introduced in the VS-2013. The video for this recording can be found here.For more information about Vector Calling Convention please view our blog.
Introducing ‘/Gw’ Compiler Switch
A compiler can only optimize away data or a function if a compiler can prove that the data or function will never be referenced. In a non-LTCG compile (i.e. a build with Whole Program Optimization (WPO) disabled) the compiler's visibility is only limited to a single module (.obj), so for data and function that has global scope, the compiler will never know if other modules will be using them. As a result of this compiler can never optimize them away. Linker has a good view of all the modules that will be linked together, so linker is in a good position to optimize away unused global data and unreferenced funct...