C++ Team Blog
The latest in C++, Visual Studio, VS Code, and vcpkg from the MSFT C++ team
Latest posts
Debugging Tips and Tricks for C++ in Visual Studio
When we write software our goal is to create correctly functioning applications the first time. Unfortunately, it rarely works that way and we spend a significant amount of time and effort debugging problems in the code rather than adding new value. Fortunately, when issues arise that need investigation Visual Studio ships a world class debugging experience to help find the issue quickly. However, many of us don’t take full advantage of the debugger because we don’t know or simply forget about many of the capabilities it offers to speed up problem solving. In this post I’ll provide a brief overview the debugging...
Using Visual C++ Runtime in Centennial project
Last update: 11/22/2017 Getting started During Build 2015, we announced the Desktop Bridge (formerly called Project Centennial) to bring your desktop apps to UWP. With the Desktop App Converter, you can package your desktop application as an appx package that can be deployed to a Windows 10 Desktop. See this link to learn more about the Desktop Bridge. If you want to convert your C++ desktop application (win32, MFC, etc.) you have to handle deployment of VC++ runtimes, such as vcruntime140.dll, as you always do for C/C++ applications. We have created support for Visual C++ Runtime in this context for the version...
C++ Edit and Continue in Visual Studio 2015 Update 3
We’ve been continuing to improve on C++ Edit and Continue (EnC) since we shipped it in Visual Studio 2015 with the default debug engine and the VC 140 toolset. We’ve addressed a fair bit of customer feedback and based on this, I’ll go over the latest developments in C++ EnC for Update 3 (download) and other clarifications in this blog post. A quick recap - Edit and Continue allows you to modify your code while debugging (for example, if you happened to find a bug in your code at runtime), and the debugger will apply your code changes to the debugged process and continue debugging with your new code! This can h...
Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 Available Now
Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 was released. Thanks to everyone who provided feedback on previous versions. You can read about the changes and additions in the release notes (lots of performance and compiler improvements) and review known issues. Use the Report a Problem option in Visual Studio to share problems with the team. For suggestions, let us know through UserVoice. We look forward to hearing from you.
Build your Android applications in Visual Studio using Gradle
This blog post is going to talk about how you can use Gradle to build Android libraries (.AAR) and APK’s and leverage Maven dependencies all in Visual Studio so let’s get started! If you are new to Gradle, then take a look at the gradle overview page and the User Guide. Gradle has really been the default build system for Android for quite some time and Android developers have slowly but surely been moving to Gradle. Gradle provides flexibility as well as the ability to define common standards for Android builds. Gradle allows Android developers to use a simple, declarative DSL to configure Gradle builds supporti...
Visual C++ for Linux Updates
Updated 6/14/2016: We updated the original announcement post with the content below if you want a single page that covers everything about this extension. The below remains the same and just covers the updates from the original release. We’re happy to provide an update on the VC++ for Linux extension which has a new release today. Go get it now (and come back). We’ve had a few drops since our initial release to make general improvements and to address your feedback. We’ll tell you here about some new features in this release, explain how your feedback has guided us, give some usage tips, and show you how to us...
Compiler improvements in VS 2015 Update 3
The C++ compiler team is excited for you to try out the compiler in Visual Studio 2015 Update 3. We've made significant progress towards C++ standards conformance between the first release of Visual Studio 2015 and VS 2015 Update 3. Update 3 also has improvements in expression SFINAE, nested namespaces, and generalized range-based for loops. Lastly, we've got a new set of switches that help you to control the version of the ISO C++ programming language you depend upon in your code. We’ve also fixed almost 200 compiler bugs since Update 2, many of which came from your reports on Connect. Thank you! We know that t...
Expression SFINAE improvements in VS 2017 RC
This post written by Xiang Fan, Andrew Pardoe, and Gabriel Dos Reis This post was updated to reflect progress we've made through VS 2017 RC since VS 2015 Update 3. Throughout the VS 2015 cycle we've been focusing on the quality of our expression SFINAE implementation. Because expression SFINAE issues can be subtle and complex we've been using popular libraries such as Boost and Microsoft's fork of Range-v3Â to validate our implementation and find remaining bugs. As we shift the compiler team's focus to Visual Studio 2017 release we're excited to tell you about the improvements we've made in correctly parsing ex...
Standards version switches in the compiler
Shareable link: https://aka.ms/versionswitches Official documentation on docs.microsoft.com. This blog post written by Gabriel Dos Reis, Ulzii Luvsanbat, and Andrew Pardoe. In Visual C++ 2015 Update 3 we are introducing tools to help you control the version of the ISO C++ programming language you depend on and the version you want VC++ to enforce in your projects. We're creating a series of new switches that correspond to versions of the C++ language, starting with and . Why add these switches? Traditionally, we would release the compiler in a default mode that combines features striding several versions of t...