C++ Team Blog
The latest in C++, Visual Studio, VS Code, and vcpkg from the MSFT C++ team
Latest posts
C11 and C17 Standard Support Arriving in MSVC
Please see our Visual Studio 2019 version 16.8 Preview 3 release notes for more of our latest features. Update: Windows 10 SDK version 2104 has been released, which includes the changes needed for C11 and C17 as well as the conformant preprocessor. It can be downloaded here. To use this SDK, follow the instructions from step 3. Our team is happy to announce that C11 and C17 are becoming supported language versions in the MSVC compiler toolset starting with Visual Studio 2019 version 16.8 Preview 3! For many years Visual Studio has only supported C to the extent of it being required for C++. Things are ab...
vcpkg: Accelerate your team development environment with binary caching and manifests
This post was updated on September 21, 2020 to add more information on the GitHub Packages binary caching example. Please see our Visual Studio 2019 version 16.8 Preview 3 release notes for more of our latest features. September is the biggest month for us in the Microsoft C++ team as it’s CppCon month! Our team has many exciting announcements for you this week, including a significant update to the vcpkg library manager for C/C++. We are excited to announce support for vcpkg binary caching and manifest files. These are key features that have been requested by our users from the beginning, and are intended ...
Microsoft C++ Team at CppCon 2020
The Microsoft C++ team has an exciting lineup of sessions at CppCon 2020. Many of us will also be present at our team’s booth in the virtual exhibition hall throughout the conference. Come say hi and let us know if you have any questions about our talks, products, or anything else! We’ll be making a few exciting announcements about Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. We’re also running a survey on the C++ ecosystem and giving away five copies of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 (one each day of the conference) to survey participants. If you have a moment, please take our survey, it's quick. Here’s the ...
New safety rules in C++ Core Check
Rust and C++ are two popular systems programming languages. For years, the focus of C++ has been on performance. We are increasingly hearing calls from customers and security researchers that C++ should have stronger safety guarantees in the language. C++ often falls behind Rust when it comes to programming safety. Visual Studio 2019 version 16.7 contains four new rules in C++ Core Check to incorporate some safety features from Rust into C++. For more detailed information on C++ Core Check, please see the C++ Core Guidelines Checker Reference documentation. If you’re just getting started with native code ana...
<bit> in Visual Studio 2019 version 16.8 Preview 2
Bit twiddling: “bit rotating and counting functions” and “integral power of two operations”.
Introducing vcperf /timetrace for C++ build time analysis
The following blog post was written by guest author Carlos Fraguas from Mercury Steam Entertainment. He describes how he used the C++ Build Insights SDK to add the new /timetrace option in vcperf, and how he also used it to build custom tools tailored to his team's needs. You can follow Carlos on Twitter using handle @MetanoKid. Hello! I’m Carlos Fraguas and I work as a Gameplay Programmer at Mercury Steam Entertainment. Let’s look at how the C++ Build Insights SDK helped me create tools to decrease build times and how I ended up adding a new visualization option into vcperf. Background There’s one t...
Introducing source dependency reporting with MSVC in Visual Studio 2019 version 16.7
C++20 demands a lot more from the ecosystem than ever before. With C++20 Modules on the horizon the compiler needs to work closely with project systems in order to provide rich information for build dependency gathering and making iterative builds faster for inner-loop development. The compiler and project teams have acknowledged the new relationship and collaborated together to bring a new switch to the compiler toolset which can provide useful information to the build system: . Source Dependency Reporting The new switch for the compiler toolset enables the compiler to generate a source-level dependency report...
AddressSanitizer for Windows: x64 and Debug Build Support
⌚ This post was last updated on March 24, 2021 with up-to-date information as of the 16.9 release of Visual Studio. Special thanks to Jim Radigan and Matthew McGovern for providing the content for this blog post. Note: This feature is now generally available. To get started, take a look at the official AddressSanitizer for Windows with MSVC documentation. Last October, we announced AddressSanitizer support for Windows as part of the x86 retail MSVC toolset. This included an IDE experience in Visual Studio with AddressSanitizer error reporting, visualized in dialog boxes anchored to the source ...
Sign Up for the Private Preview of Visual Studio support for Codespaces!
At the Microsoft Build conference, you may have seen our C++ Codespaces demo (at 26:00). We showed several ways Codespaces can improve your C++ development experience, including offloading your builds and other compute-heavy tasks to the cloud. We’ve already been chatting with many you, and now we are ready to allow more people into the Private Preview. Currently, our support is focused on C++ console applications and library development, so if that sounds like you, sign up for the Private Preview (and make sure to indicate “C++” as your Preferred Dev Language). What is Codespaces? Codespaces are cloud-powe...