C++ Team Blog

Preview of using CMake Presets for Azure Sphere development

Marc Goodner May 27, 2021 May 27, 2021 05/27/21

We are happy to announce that CMake Presets preview support is available in the Visual Studio 16.10 release as well as CMake Tools version 1.7 for Visual Studio Code. Erika introduced CMake Presets and why you should use them, this post will focus on how they can be used for Azure Sphere development across Visual Studio, VS Code, and GitHub...

C++20 Ranges are complete in Visual Studio 2019 version 16.10

Casey Carter May 26, 2021 May 26, 2021 05/26/21

We are proud to announce completion of our implementation of C++20 Ranges in the Standard Library in the VS2019 v16.10 release under/std:c++latest. We announced the first useful user-visible parts of Ranges in VS 2019 v16.6 in mid 2020, the trickle accelerated into a gushing stream, and the final parts are now in place. This represents a huge ...

How to start using registries with vcpkg

Nicole Mazzuca May 24, 2021 May 24, 2021 05/24/21

For many users of vcpkg, the built-in repository of packages is completely sufficient. If you only need public, non-experimental libraries, the default vcpkg registry is completely fine. However, once you go outside of this world - once you have company-internal libraries, or you want to use experimental libraries, the recommended solution is ...

All vcpkg enterprise features now generally available: versioning, binary caching, manifests and registries

Augustin Popa May 19, 2021 May 19, 2021 05/19/21

We are announcing today that all major vcpkg enterprise features are no longer experimental. The latest vcpkg release makes versioning, binary caching, manifests and registries generally available to any developer, team or enterprise. We have steadily been adding to vcpkg over the years. What started as a small open source project to ...

Microsoft C++ Code Analysis supports SARIF 2.1

Hwi-sung Im May 13, 2021 May 13, 2021 05/13/21

Starting with Visual Studio 16.8, MSVC Code Analysis officially supports SARIF 2.1.0 standard. SARIF is an industry standard for representing static analysis logs and we've been one of the earliest collaborators with the SARIF Technical Committee. Behind the scenes, analysis log files in the SARIF format powers Visual Studio IDE to ...

OpenMP Updates and Fixes for C++ in Visual Studio 2019 version 16.10

Chris Pulido May 12, 2021 May 12, 2021 05/12/21

In our previous blog post about improved OpenMP support in Visual Studio, we announced the addition of the -openmp:llvm switch in Visual Studio 2019 version 16.9 to enable compiled programs to target LLVM’s OpenMP runtime library for the x64 architecture. This switch supports all the OpenMP 2.0 directives that -openmp supports, as well as ...

New Static Analysis Rule for Bounds Checking

Jordan Maples May 11, 2021 May 11, 2021 05/11/21

We have added a new experimental static analysis rule in Visual Studio 16.10 version Preview 3 - C26458, WARNING_PATH_SENSITIVE_USE_GSL_AT. The new warning is a more precise and less noisy version of warning C26446, WARNING_USE_GSL_AT. Both warnings analyse standard containers for unchecked element access and they both share the warning ...

Finding Bugs with AddressSanitizer: Patterns from Open Source Projects

Kevin Cadieux May 10, 2021 May 10, 2021 05/10/21

AddressSanitizer (ASan) was officially released in Visual Studio 2019 version 16.9. We recently used this feature to find and fix a bug in the MSVC compiler itself. To further validate the usefulness of our ASan implementation, we also used it on a collection of widely used open source projects where it found bugs in Boost, Azure IoT C SDK, ...

2x-3x Performance Improvements for Debug Builds

Pranav Kant May 7, 2021 May 7, 2021 05/7/21

We have made substantial runtime performance improvements in the x86/x64 C++ compiler for Visual Studio's default debug configuration. For Visual Studio 2019 version 16.10 Preview 2, we measure 2x - 3x speedup for programs compiled in debug mode. These improvements come from reducing the overhead introduced by runtime checks (/...

Ignoring Automatic Initialization for Code Analysis

Gabor Horvath May 6, 2021 May 6, 2021 05/6/21

Reading uninitialized memory is one of the major sources of security vulnerabilities in C and C++ programs. Microsoft developed many tools to find such errors including compiler warnings, static analysis checks, and more recently: code instrumentation.  For a more detailed overview of uninitialized memory related vulnerabilities and ...