C++ Team Blog
The latest in C++, Visual Studio, VS Code, and vcpkg from the MSFT C++ team
Latest posts
C++ game development workload in Visual Studio 2017
Visual Studio 2017 introduces a new "Game development with C++" workload, making it easy to get tools you need for building high-quality games with C++. Whether you’re using DirectX or powerful game engines such as Unreal Engine or Cocos2d, Visual Studio can install everything you need all at once to get you started quickly. In this blog post, we will talk about how to install Visual Studio for four different C++ game development scenarios: DirectX games for desktop, DirectX games for Universal Windows Platform (UWP), games with the Unreal Engine, and games with the Cocos2d engine. Install Visual Studio for Dire...
Completed UserVoice Suggestions in Visual Studio 2017
Visual Studio 2017 RTM has shipped. We could not have done it without you. Your suggestions and feedback on UserVoice. More than 6,000 of you have participated on the Visual C++ feedback forum and have cast thousands of votes for hundreds of suggestions. This release includes 37 completed suggestions totaling 1546 votes from 772 unique community members. Did you make or add your votes supporting any of these suggestions? Remember, if you voted on completed items, your votes are returned so you can su...
C++ Standards Conformance from Microsoft
Since we first shipped Visual Studio 2015 we’ve talked a lot about Microsoft Visual C++ compiler and library (MSVC) conformance improvements in this blog. Our team has been focused on making MSVC the best compiler toolset for your development on Windows, and that starts with fully conforming to the existing C++ Standard. This post will look back on the progress we’ve made in MSVC and look forward to our plans in the next version. We’re not just implementing the C++ Standard, we’re helping to develop it. The MSVC team is a major contributor to the development of the C++ Standard. In addition to our participation ...
C++14 conformance improvements: constexpr and aggregate initialization
Two important features in C++11 received small upgrades in C++14 that had far-reaching effects. You can see from the CppReference site that while both of these changes were small changes to the standard (search for the "C++14" annotation on those pages) they had broad impact on the compiler’s implementation and on what code developers can write. We’re happy to announce that the compiler shipping with Visual Studio 2017 supports both extended constexpr and NSDMI for aggregates fully. Extended constexpr Our extended constexpr work was test-driven. We tested against a number of libraries that are hea...
Visual Studio Code C/C++ extension March 2017 Update
Last week marked an important and exciting milestone for the C/C++ extension for Visual Studio Code: this extension has been installed for over 1 million times since it shipped just a year ago! Thanks to everyone who tried it and provided us invaluable feedback to help shape the extension what it is today. But we are still early in this journey! We have been and will continue to add features and fixes to the extension. So please keep your feedback coming! Just last week we shipped another update (March 2017) to the C/C++ extension for Visual Studio Code. The original blog post has been updated with changes in th...
Finding installed Visual C++ tools for Visual Studio 2017
There have been a number of questions from customers about how to locate the tools in the world of this new installation model. The following blog post will share a number of options available for locating Visual Studio 2017 instances and provides various samples that illustrates the process in action. How to find installed Visual Studio 2017 instances and C++ tools There are multiple ways you can go about the finding the VS instances installed and determining the tools installed for each instance. 1. vswhere.exe: A stand-alone native executable that is redistributable and can be used to locate installed...
Always Set Impossible Goals
Impossible goals are like dreams, we always pursue them, with the hopes they will come true. In one of my recent experiences, I managed a feature crew, C++ Fast Project Load (FPL), a team of exceptional people. Personally, I'm very passionate about performance, as I believe it makes our interaction with our beloved machines much more satisfying. As large codebases grow over time, they tend to suffer from a slow performance loading and building in Visual Studio. Most of the root causes were originating from our project system architecture. For years, we made decent improvements (percentages), just to see them wip...
Happy 25th Birthday MFC!
February 26th marks the 25th anniversary for the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC). Join us in wishing MFC a big Happy Birthday! MFC saw the light of day on February 26th 1992 and it has been a very large part of the Microsoft C++ legacy ever since. While Visual C++ 1.0 would only ship one year later (with MFC 2.0), in 1992 MFC 1.0 was laying the foundation as part of the Microsoft C/C++ 7.0 product. Here’s a snippet of that announcement that we dusted off from the Microsoft archives: SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Feb.26, 1992 Microsoft Debuts C/C++ 7.0 Development System for Windows 3.1 High-Performance Object Tech...
Learn C++ Concepts with Visual Studio and the WSL
点这里看中文版 Concepts promise to fundamentally change how we write templated C++ code. They're in a Technical Specification (TS) right now, but, like Coroutines, Modules, and Ranges, it's good to get a head start on learning these important features before they make it into the C++ Standard. You can already use Visual Studio 2017 for Coroutines, Modules, and Ranges through a fork of Range-v3. Now you can also learn Concepts in Visual Studio 2017 by targeting the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Read on to find out how! About concepts Concepts enable adding requirements to a set of template parameters, essentially ...