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C++ Team Blog
The latest in C++, Visual Studio, VS Code, and vcpkg from the MSFT C++ team
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Tony Goodhew on Visual C++ Developer Communication
Charles Torre, our C++ fan in Channel 9, just posted an interview he made a few days ago to Tony Goodhew: a Microsoft veteran in the Developer Tools Division who has returned home to his roots in VC++ after working as a product manager on VC6. One of Tony's priorities is effectively communicating with developer customers who expect open and honest answers to ALL of their questions. How does this process work? How can you effectively communicate your plan if your plan is still being created? You want answers, and Tony has the responsibility of ensuring that the answers we give to you regarding VC++ are in f...

The Visual C++ Weekly Vol. 1 Issue 9 (Feb 26, 2011)
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C++ Renaissance: First Symptoms of Contagion in Traditionally Non-Native Teams
You may already know Pete Brown but if you don’t, I’ll briefly introduce him here: he’s, like me, a Community Program Manager with Microsoft but while I’m focused on C/C++ languages and the Visual C++ tool, he’s devoted to client-side development technologies (mainly WPF and Silverlight, with some Windows Phone 7 and XNA, a bit less of HTML and JavaScript –Rey Bango covers these two web techs- and a bit of C++ as well, although this last hasn’t happened for months, if not years (even before last December, when there was no C++ Community PM at all). In his own words: My C++ is slightly more rusty than an old t...

Can Touch This: Developer Guidance for Touch-Enabled Applications
Those who, beside this blog, read Windows Developer resources, may have noticed that at the beginning of this month that sibling team released a “Windows 7 Touch Application Development Guidance”. This guidance is purposed to make you learn about: This is ideal for software developers who want to take full advantage of Windows on touch-enabled PCs. And if you really enjoy touch enabled application development, we recommend you to read a series of articles that our colleague Gus Class is writing: … everything indicates that Gus will keep sharing his knowledge to help us m...

The Visual C++ Weekly Vol. 1 Issue 8 (Feb 19, 2011)
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MFC Application Instance Control
An interesting question, asked days ago in one of our C++ forums, was the following: A possible approach, based in mutex (mutual exclusion) objects, was posted a few hours later. In the proposed schema you declare a mutex object inside the MFC application class (i.e. the class header): When you define the MFC application InitInstance() method, you attempt to create the mutex -whose creation will succeed the first time, fail afterward.- About the else, the solution proponent (Bordon) said the following The "SendMessage" is only needed if you want that the running application...

The Visual C++ Weekly Vol. 1 Issue 7 (Feb 12, 2011)
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shared_ptr – Advanced STL, Part 1
Part 1 of my video lecture series exploring the Standard Template Library's implementation is now available. In this part, I explain how some of shared_ptr's magic works, including type erasure and make_shared<T>()'s optimizations that save both space and time. This advanced series assumes that you're familiar with C++ and the STL's interface, but not the STL's implementation. If you haven't used the STL extensively yet, I recommend watching my introductory series. For reference, here are all of the links: [STL Introduction]Part 1 (sequence containers)Part 2 (associative containe...

Go Ask printf() To Behave Predictably
This is one of those problems whose solution is very evident… or bitterly hard to guess depending on how much you were influenced by what you were told about it.I’ll paste here the case You will rapidly solve it… or not! It will actually depend on what it impressed you the most about the symptoms.