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C++ Team Blog
The latest in C++, Visual Studio, VS Code, and vcpkg from the MSFT C++ team
Latest posts

C++ debugging survey
The Visual Studio Debugger Team is currently planning features for the next release of Visual Studio. We would like to hear from our C++ developers to make sure that their needs are understood. Please take a couple of minutes to complete the very short survey below. The survey is totally anonymous and the data that you provide will help us build a better product for you.http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/cppdebuggingThanks,Brad SullivanVisual Studio Debugger Team

VS2010 Visualization and Modeling Feature Pack
Recently we announced the availability of Visualization and Modeling Feature Pack for MSDN subscribers which complements the Architecture tools in VS2010. There is great C/C++ code visualization support in there. Read a blog post by Somasegar here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2010/06/17/modeling-websites-and-native-code.aspx Thanks,VikasVC++ Team.

A post about editor extension for security and banned APIs
Security is something we take very seriously and we work with a number of teams across the company to keep native apps as secure as possible. An example of this in Visual Studio 2010 was our work on the GS flag. One of our colleagues, Tim Burrell, who has helped us develop these ideas has written a post on the Security Development Lifecycle blog in which he takes advantage of our new editor extensibility enhancements to help developers catch unsafe code more quickly. I think this is the tip of the iceberg in terms of what people will come up with to push quality higher up into the lifecycle of development and I c...

Exploring the Visual C++ Browse Database
Hello, this is Jim Springfield. This post will cover some low-level details about how we represent information in the browse database in VS 2010. As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, we are using SQL Server Compact Edition (SSCE) for storing information about all of the C, C++, and IDL files in your solution. I will show some SQL examples that illustrate how to mine this database for information about your code.NOTE: The particular database schema we use in VS2010 may very well change in future versions, so the examples I show may not work in future versions of VS.Opening the SDF fileThe ...

How we test the compiler backend
My name is Alex Thaman and I am a Senior Test Lead on the Visual C++ compiler team at Microsoft. The focus of this blog is testing of the compiler backend where I’ve spent a good portion of my time here. For those not aware, this is the part of the compiler that takes an intermediate representation as an input, does optimizations and code generation. I will walk you through the compiler backend testing domain, the kinds of bugs that the backend compiler deals with and how we go about testing the backend compiler. The Compiler testing domain Compiler testing exists in a different d...

Announcing Hilo
What is Hilo? Project “Hilo” is an effort to tell the story of building high performing, responsive rich Windows applications using C++. We will do this by walking you through our own experience of building some sample applications which we believe provide differentiated user experiences. We will tell you everything from setting up the development environment to taking advantage of the feature set of Windows 7. The Samples The first of these sample applications is a photo browser that implements a touch-enabled user interface for browsing photos on your computer. We call it the Hilo Browser. Below is a s...

Flexible Project-to-Project References
My name is Amit Mohindra and I am a Program Manager with the Visual C++ IDE team. In this post I would like to talk about project-to-project references. In VS2010 release we moved the C++ build and project system to be based on MSBuild. There is an excellent article written by Marian Luparu detailing the change and advantages of the new build/project system (http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2008/11/20/printf-hello-msbuild-n.aspx). Project to Project references have existed ever since Visual Studio 6. However the term has evolved over the years. Native technologies used Project dependencies to define reference...

Custom Build Steps, Tools, and Events
In VS 2008, Visual C++ had a couple of the simple scenarios called Custom Build Step and Custom Build Tool. This post will discuss a couple of the simple build extension options you have, and how they’ve changed since VS 2008. Andrew Arnott discusses these scenarios and how they work in VS 2010 here

Quick Help on VS2010 Custom Build Rule
Hi my name is Li Shao. I am a Software Design Engineer in Test for the C++ team. In my earlier blog “Visual Studio 2010 C++ Project Upgrade Guide”, I have mentioned about the change of Custom build Rules in VS2010. In this post, I would like to explain in more detail of the new format of the Custom Build Rules and some of its limitations in VS2010.Custom build rule is a build feature introduced in VS2005. It provides the ability for the users to easily Plug-In third party tools to use in their build process. The custom build rule is defined by “.rules” files. Rules for MASM (Microsoft Micr...