C++ Team Blog
The latest in C++, Visual Studio, VS Code, and vcpkg from the MSFT C++ team
Latest posts
Channel 9 Video: VC 10: Stephan T. Lavavej and Damien Watkins – Inside STL
As Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1was being released, Charles Torre from Channel 9 came over to the Visual C++ team to talk about some of our new features. On this visit he spoke with Stephan T. Lavavej and myself about our VS2010 STL implementation. As Charles says on the Channel 9 page: “We have already heard about many of the language improvements (auto, decltype, lambdas, rvalue references, …) all of which can be put to good use when using the Standard Template Library (STL). Here … tell us all about the latest version of STL. We talk about how the language features are en...
STL Breaking Changes in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1
Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 is now available for download. I've recently blogged about how Visual C++ in VS 2010 Beta 1, which I refer to as VC10 Beta 1, contains compiler support for five C++0x core language features: lambdas, auto, static_assert, rvalue references, and decltype. It also contains a substantially rewritten implementation of the C++ Standard Library, supporting many C++0x standard library features. In the near future, I'll blog about them in Part 4 and beyond of "C++0x Features in VC10", but today I'm going to talk about the STL changes that have the potential to break existing cod...
/DYNAMICBASE and /NXCOMPAT
Hello, my name is Xiang Fan and I am a developer on the C++ Shanghai team. Today I’d like to talk about two linker options related to security: /DYNAMICBASE and /NXCOMPAT. These two options are introduced in VS2005, and target to improve the overall security of native applications. You can set these two options explicitly in VS IDE: These two options have three available values in the IDE: On, Off and Default. They are set to “On” if you create native C++ application using VS2008 wizard. When VS2008 upgrades projects created by older version of VC which doesn’t support these o...
Using the Windows 7 RC SDK in Visual C++ 2010 Beta 1
Though the Windows 7 RC SDK was released about 2 weeks before Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, it was not possible to incorporate that release into VS 2010 Beta 1. As a result, the Windows SDK components that ship as part of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 are the Windows 7 Beta SDK versions. This post will describe how you can use the Native Multitargeting feature in Visual Studio 2010 to compile and link your applications against the Windows SDK supporting Windows 7 RC. Step 1: Download and install the RC SDK from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=F75F2CA8-C1E4-4801-9281-2F5F28F12DBD&displaylan...
VC++ IDE / Design Time Stress Testing
Hi, my name is Jianhua Li, and I am a VC++ IDE QA. Today I am going to talk about VC++ IDE / Design Time stress testing. What is stress testing? Design Time Stress (DTS) is part of a broader set of reliability quality criteria focused on measuring an application's robustness, availability and reliability under stressful conditions. It's scoped to Design Time Components which are components exercised by the user when working in the IDE, for example, browsing or intellisense. Why do we need to “stress” our product?Basically, we want to make sure our product, VC++ IDE, works reasonably under c...
decltype: C++0x Features in VC10, Part 3
Part 1 of this series covered lambdas, auto, and static_assert. Part 2 of this series covered rvalue references, which enable move semantics and perfect forwarding. Today, I'm going to talk about decltype, which allows perfect forwarding functions to have arbitrary return types. It's of interest to people who are writing highly generic code. the return type problem C++98/03 has an interesting blind spot - given an expression like x * y, where x and y have arbitrary types, there's no way to say "the type of x * y". If x is of type Watts and y is of type Seconds, then x * y mig...
Tech-Ed North America 2009
Most of you must be aware of the upcoming Microsoft® Tech·Ed North America 2009 in Los Angeles. This event provides hands-on learning, deep product exploration and opportunities to connect with industry and Microsoft experts one-to-one. Anyone attending and interested in C++ development will find the following Tech.Ed sessions useful: In addition, Raman Sharma from the Visual C++ team will be present at the Native Languages booth on all days of the event. We would be delighted to meet you during the event at one of the above sessions or in the booth. Thank youVisual C+...
VC MSBuild Extensibility Example
Hello, my name is Felix Huang and I am a developer on the Visual C++ team. Over the last year, I worked on making the build system in Visual Studio 2010 more flexible with MSBuild system as the foundation. For those who felt the need to use batch scripts to power your builds, I hope that this new system would provide you with that much flexibility while maintaining a similar UI feeling as the previous version of Visual Studio. Previous article written by Marian Luparu touches more on the benefits of MSBuild. In this post, I will provide an example augmenting the build system and property ...
Interested in using web services in your native C/C++ code?
If you are planning to use web services in your native C/C++, here is how you can learn how you can do that. 1) On 04/01/2009, Nikola Dudar will be hosting a web cast on Windows Web Services API as part of Microsoft Virtual TechDays for Developers. Nikola is going to introduce Windows Web Services API and demonstrate how using WWSAPI you can build web services and clients to them. You can register for the session here. 2) You can watch video recordings from talks on building web services in native C/C++ code: a.  ...