C++ Team Blog
The latest in C++, Visual Studio, VS Code, and vcpkg from the MSFT C++ team
Latest posts
Deep Dive into NuGet Native (Part One)
Howdy! Today I thought I’d start explaining how NuGet supports C/C++ packages under the covers, and look into how one could (theoretically) manually construct a package without using the CoApp PowerShell tools. As I mentioned before, C/C++ packages built for NuGet didn't require a whole lot of change in NuGet itself—primarily because if we had made the Package Manager do all the complex work that was necessary to hook up a project, we’d be still implementing it all a year from now. Instead we chose to add a fairly simple (and often requested) feature to NuGet, the ability to import MSBuild proj...
Optimizing C++ Code : Overview
If you have arrived in the middle of this blog series, you might want instead to begin at the beginning. This post explains the flow of data within the Visual C++ compiler – starting with our C++ source program, and ending with a corresponding binary program. This post is an easy one – dipping our toes into the shallow end of ocean. Let's examine what happens when we compile a single-file program, stored in App.cpp, from the command-line. (If you were to launch the compilation from within Visual Studio, the diagram below would have to include higher layers of software; however, these end up emi...
C++ REST SDK 1.0.0 is now available
Since our last release, the C++ REST SDK team has been working on improving the overall quality of the SDK to transition out of the beta phase. We are excited to announce that the C++ REST SDK has reached release quality and that v1.0.0 is now available for download! With the recent NuGet support for C++ projects, we’ve also decided to also release the C++ REST SDK as a NuGet package. You can now download the SDK directly into Visual Studio through the NuGet package manager. This release stabilizes several APIs and fixes multiple customer-reported issues.Please visit us on CodePlex to learn more ...
Optimizing C++ Code
Hi, my name is Jim Hogg and I am a Program Manager, working in the Visual C++ compiler team in Microsoft, based on the main campus here in Redmond. More specifically, I work in the part of the compiler that optimizes your code, to make it run faster, or to make it smaller, or a mixture of the two. In this series of blog posts, I will explain some of the optimizations that make your code run faster. I'll include examples, with measurements of how much gain various optimizations might deliver. I'll then describe some of the more recent optimizations that the team has added, transforming your code in amazing, non-ob...
Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) – Under the Hood
To introduce myself I am Ankit Asthana and I am the program manager for the backend C++ compiler. In my last few blogs I provided an introduction to what PGO is all about along with case studies which covered how Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) is used to make real world applications such as SAP NetWeaver and Windows PHP faster. In this blog I would like to talk about how PGO works under the hood and helps produce faster code. So let us take a look at how PGO helps the compiler backend in building an optimized version of an application. Once we know how PGO optimizations work, we can understand how PGO makes ap...
New Channel 9 video on the Visual Studio 3D Starter Kit now online
If you’re interested in DirectX development, head on over to Channel 9, where there’s a new video about the Visual Studio 3D Starter Kit. This time, Roberto Sonnino interviews Gokhan Sengun, who’s created the Virtual Experiment Laboratory app, which is the first known app on the Windows Store that was built using the Starter Kit - at least, that wasn’t built by a Microsoft employee. :) Gohkan shares some tips on using the Starter Kit, and also some great demos of the Visual Studio Shader Designer. To learn more about the Visual Studio 3D Starter Kit, check out our pr...
Image Processing with C++ AMP and the .NET Framework
Image processing is a computational task that lends itself very well to GPU compute scenarios. In many cases the most commonly used algorithms are inherently massively parallel, with each pixel in the image being processed independently from the others. As a result, image processing toolkits have been early adopters of the new GPGPU programming model. Many of these mass-market toolkits, however, can be more accurately described as image manipulation packages that offer "image-in, image-out" capabilities; in other words, for each operation there is an input image and a resulting output (manipulated) image. In cont...
Speed up Windows PHP Performance using Profile Guided Optimization (PGO)
To introduce myself I am Ankit Asthana and I am the program manager for the backend C++ compiler. In my last two blogs I provided an introduction to what Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) is all about and a case study which illustrates how PGO is used to make SAP NetWeaver faster. In this blog I would like to present the story about how PGO is used make official Windows PHP binaries faster. Stephen Zarkos (Program Manager for Windows PHP) has been kind enough for providing the content for this blog. After reading this blog you folks should be able to further understand and use this case study to intr...
NuGet for C++ and the Northwest Hackathon
Howdy!My name is Garrett Serack, I'm not actually part of the Visual C++ team--I actually work as a Senior Software Development Engineer in Microsoft's Open Source Technology Center, which is part of Windows Server. I have a distinctly different job than most here at Microsoft-I work to get Open Source software running better on Windows and Azure.A little over a week ago, I released the beta version of the CoApp PowerShell tools that let us generate NuGet packages for C and C++ libraries.Over the next few weeks, I'll try to explain what the heck goes on under the covers when creating packages ...