C++ Team Blog
The latest in C++, Visual Studio, VS Code, and vcpkg from the MSFT C++ team
Latest posts
Steps to Open Actionable Bugs
Hi, I am Vaishnavi Sannidhanam, test lead from the Visual C++ Compiler Backend team. I joined Visual C++ team 4 years ago and helped ship VS2005 and VS2008. In this blog, I would like to introduce you to the most effective way of reporting actionable bugs to us.Where to open the bug When you find a bug, the best way for you to report it, is to reach us through Microsoft Connect. To report a bug through Microsoft Connect, open the Connect page (https://connect.microsoft.com/) and click on “Your Dashboard”. Select the project the bug pertains to and proceed with opening the bug.Usage Scenario...
Visual C++ Code Generation in Visual Studio 2010
Hello, I’m Ten Tzen, a Compiler Architect on the Visual C++ Compiler Code Generation team. Today, I’m going to introduce some noteworthy improvements in Visual Studio 2010. Faster LTCG Compilation: LTCG (Link Time Code Generation) allows the compiler to perform better optimizations with information on all modules in the program (for more details see here). To merge information from all modules, LTCG compilation generally takes longer than non-LTCG compilation, particularly for large applications. In VS2010, we improved the information merging process and sped up LTCG compilatio...
Channel 9 Video: Stephan T. Lavavej – Everything you ever wanted to know about nullptr
Stephan T. Lavavej is back in front of the Channel 9 cameras once again for a discussion on our recently implemented C++0x feature “nullptr”. In a previous channel 9 appearance, Stephan spoke about the C++0x language and library features we were implementing for VS2010 and the various interdependencies between various features (for example, how rvalue references – a language feature – enable move semantics and perfect forwarding in our Standard Template Library implementation – a library feature.) In this video Stephan describes how rvalue references exposed a few loopholes in ...
Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Is Now Available For Download
We are very pleased to announce we have released Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. You can read the official Beta 2 announcement on Soma’s blog. The Visual C++ team has added a few new features and, of course, many bug fixes. The additional features include some substantial new functionality in the MFC library and the return of the MFC Class Wizard. We are currently filming some Channel 9 videos and writing a few VC Blog posts. Our first two Channel 9 videos on Beta 2 are already online. The video on the C++0x Language feature “nullptr” is here and the video on the MFC features ...
Visual C++ Code Model in Visual Studio 2010
Hello, I’m Vytautas Leonavičius, a developer on the Visual C++ IDE team. Today, I’d like to discuss how the new principles we’re applying to code browsing in Visual Studio 2010 (see here and here) will affect VCCodeModel. General information about VCCodeModel can be found here.ImprovementsBecause of our new incremental update architecture, VCCodeModel implicitly gets certain benefits:• Availability: Once initial population is done, VCCodeModel is pretty much always available. That is a positive result of design decisions to parse files in...
The ATL/MFC Trace Tool and the Tracing Mechanism
Hi, I am Pat Brenner, a Software Design Engineer in the Visual C++ Libraries group. Some time back I wrote about Spy++. Today, I am going to write about another Visual Studio debugging tool, the ATL/MFC Trace Tool, and the tracing mechanism that it interacts with in ATL and MFC. The tracing mechanism The tracing mechanism is used to control the type of information, and the amount of that information, that is dumped to the output window during execution of a program. There are a number of categories of information, and different levels of that information, that can be displayed. The tracing macr...
Ribbon Designer
Hello, my name is Samatha Mannem and I am a QA with the IDE team. The world has become sophisticated and the time has come to make every application geeky as well as fancy. That is where ‘Ribbon’ has evolved. The recent UI designs that people are attracted to are Microsoft Office and Windows 7 ribbons. While Visual Studio 2008 SP1 included the ability to create an application that has a ribbon UI, it was difficult for you to configure it as desired. Detailed Information on Ribbon Designer VS2008 is available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386089.aspx. The Visual Studio product team received a lot of...
User Feedback
Hello! My name is Joshua Baxter, and I am a programming writer on the Microsoft team that produces Help content for Visual C++. I am writing this article to explain how Microsoft collects and handles user feedback. User feedback is an important part of our documentation improvement program. We maintain over 33,000 topics about C++, and we receive an average of 350 comments from Help users every month. Not only does your feedback help us to improve the quality of existing documentation, it also helps us improve the quality of future documentation. Most of the feedback we receive comes from ratings an...
Linker throughput
Hello, my name is Chandler Shen, a developer from the Visual C++ Shanghai team.We have made some changes in the upcoming Visual C++ 2010 release to improve the performance of linker. I would like to first give a brief overview of the linker and how we analyze the bottlenecks of current implementation. Later, I will describe the changes we made and the impact on linker performance.Our Focus We were targeting the linker throughput of large scale projects full build scenario because this scenario matters most in linker throughput scalability. Incremental linking and smaller projects will not benefit from the wo...