C++ Team Blog
The latest in C++, Visual Studio, VS Code, and vcpkg from the MSFT C++ team
Latest posts
C++ Debugging and Diagnostics
Debugging is one of the cornerstones of software development, and it can consume a significant portion of a developer’s day. The Visual Studio native debugger provides a powerful and feature-rich experience for finding and fixing problems that arise in your applications, no matter the type of problem or how difficult it is to solve. In fact, there are so many debugging features and tools inside Visual Studio that it can be a bit overwhelming for new users. This blog is meant to give you a quick tour of the Visual Studio native debugger and how it can help you in all areas of your C++ development. Table of Con...
Visual Studio for Teams of C++ Developers
In this blog post we will dive into how Visual Studio supports teams of C and C++ developers. We’ll begin by creating a small C++ program and placing it in a Git repository in Visual Studio Team Services. Next we'll see how to commit and push updates and get updates from others. Finally, we will work with GitHub repos using the GitHub extension for Visual Studio. Adding an Existing C++ Project to Git in Visual Studio Team Services In this example, you will create a small sample application and use Visual Studio to create a Git repository in Visual Studio Team Services. If you have an existing project, you can use...
What’s new with IncrediBuild and Visual Studio 2017
As a part of Visual Studio 2015 release, we introduced a partnership between IncrediBuild and Visual Studio. This partnership allowed developers to install IncrediBuild from the Build Accelerator menu and benefit from a few key build acceleration features free of charge. Based upon the feedback we have heard, with Visual Studio 2017, we have made some changes to this experience which are as follows. Install IncrediBuild from the Visual Studio Installer Once you have downloaded the Visual Studio 2017 installer, IncrediBuild is presented as an optional component for C++ workloads namely ‘Desktop development with C...
Visual Studio 2017 for C++ developers – you will love it
Here on the C++ product team at Microsoft, our mission is to make the lives of every C++ developer on the planet better. We try to do that via various avenues, including but not limited to, It is that last investment, Visual Studio, which I wanted to focus on in this blog post. Specifically, we’ll focus on the latest release, Visual Studio 2017, which we are confident you are going to love! We have blogged previously about the value in VS2017, so this post will just be a summary pointing to older posts we wrote that are now all updated for the final RTM release. First, we’ll summarize the new...
C++ Code Analysis improvements in Visual Studio 2017 RTM
This blog post was written by Sunny Chatterjee and Andrew Pardoe Visual Studio 2017 RTM release includes the C++ Core Guidelines Checkers as part of Code Analysis tools for C/C++. We have gotten a ton of useful feedback on the early previews of these checks through our external customers. Thank you for engaging with us and giving us great feedback. This feedback helped us improve the quality of the final released version of C++ Core Guidelines checks. Some of these improvements are explained in detail in this blog post about correctness. Besides shipping the C++ Core Guidelines checker, we also fixed more t...
Check for const correctness with the C++ Core Guidelines Checker
This blog post was written by Sunny Chatterjee and Andrew Pardoe The C++ Core Guidelines focus on simple ways that you can improve the correctness and safety of your code. We introduced the C++ Core Guidelines Checkers to help automate enforcement of the C++ Core Guidelines in your code. One of the easiest and most important changes you can make to your code is to mark immutable data as `const`. It’s not us and the Core Guidelines who believe that: see this fantastic blog post from Bruce Dawson about the benefits of adding to your code. (He also mentions that on MSVC removing can make some code faster, but th...
Binary Compatibility and Pain-free Upgrade: Why Moving to Visual Studio 2017 is almost “too easy”
Visual Studio 2017 is a major leap forward in terms of C++ functionality compared with VS 2015. We hope the new release will delight you in your day-to-day job as soon as you can upgrade. This blog post focuses on the steps needed to upgrade from Visual Studio 2015 to 2017. As promised in our BUILD 2016 talk "6 reasons to move your C++ code to Visual Studio 2015" (click to jump to 1h:04), in this release, our team made it distinctively easy to move your codebase to Visual Studio 2017. And here are the four reasons why. Get MSVC 2015.3 toolset via the Visual Studio 2017 Installer Loading your C++ projects targeti...
MSVC: The best choice for Windows
The C++ product team here at Microsoft offers a great C++ experience in the Visual Studio IDE, the Visual Studio Code editor, and various other tools and services. That includes the topic of this blog post: the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler and libraries toolset (MSVC). Our goal for MSVC is to be the best compiler choice on Windows for targeting Windows, regardless of what editor or IDE you choose to use. We aim to deliver on our goal with continuous investments in the following key areas: full C++ conformance, better errors and warnings, runtime performance, reliability, build throughput, and the best securit...
Use any C++ Compiler with Visual Studio
Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 supports several C++ compilers to suit a wide variety of codebases. In addition to the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler that many of you are likely familiar with, Visual Studio 2017 also supports Clang, GCC, and other compilers when targeting certain platforms. This post is intended to familiarize you with the variety of C++ compilers that are compatible with the Visual Studio IDE, and to understand when they might be applicable to use with your projects. Some compilers may be better suited to your needs depending on your project or target. Alternatively, you may be interested in c...