C++ Team Blog
The latest in C++, Visual Studio, VS Code, and vcpkg from the MSFT C++ team
Latest posts
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-v3 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...
C++ Core Guidelines Checkers are now in a single NuGet package
Update: The C++ Core Guidelines Checkers are now included in-box with Visual Studio 2017. See this post for details: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2016/10/12/cppcorecheck It has been an exciting year since the C++ Core Guidelines and checkers were announced starting with Bjarne Stroustrup's opening keynote at CppCon 2015. We've shipped multiple releases of our CppCoreCheck analysis tools through NuGet. The Clang community has kept up the pace implementing the C++ Core Guidelines checks in Clang-Tidy. And we've seen a steady stream of commits to our implementation of the Guidelines Support Library on Gi...
Clang 3.8 in the May release of Clang with Microsoft CodeGen
This blog post written by Dave Bartolomeo, Yuriy Solodkyy, and Andrew Pardoe We have just released our fifth out-of-band update of Clang/C2 toolset. As always, this release has been driven by your feedback. While we've heard a lot of feature requests the one's we've heard most frequently are that you want Clang 3.8 and you want x64-hosted compilers. We're happy to say that we're shipping both Clang 3.8 and x64-hosted compilers in the May 2016 release. Clang 3.8 is the latest official release of Clang. Moving to Clang 3.8 brings in roughly six months of features and bug fixes from the Clang community. We've also...
May/June update for the C/C++ extension in Visual Studio Code
We would like to thank all of you who have tried out the C/C++ extension in Visual Studio Code and have already provided rich feedback on your experiences and filed issues and requests with us. We are working hard on incorporating your feedback into the product. Continuing with our effort to make Visual Studio Code as the editor tool of choice for C++ developers with this update of the C/C++ extension, we are introducing the following features: • Code formatting with clang-format • Fuzzy Auto-Complete for C/C++ code • Debugging on Windows for Cygwin/MinGW applications • Console application debugging with GDB on t...
Introducing a new, advanced Visual C++ code optimizer
We are excited to announce the preview release of a new, advanced code optimizer for the Visual C++ compiler backend. It provides many improvements for both code size and performance, bringing the optimizer to a new standard of quality expected from a modern native compiler. This is the first public release and we are encouraging people to try it and provide suggestions and feedback about potential bugs. The official release of the new optimizer is expected to be Visual Studio Update 3, while the release available today is unsupported and mostly for testing purposes. How to try it out The compiler bits with ...