C++ Team Blog
The latest in C++, Visual Studio, VS Code, and vcpkg from the MSFT C++ team
Latest posts
Compiler improvements in VS 2015 Update 2
The C++ compiler team is excited for you to try out the compiler in Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 CTP 1. Since Update 1 we’ve made progress on being Standards-conformant for lot of C++11 and C++14 features. One particularly big milestone is that our standard library in Update 2 supports every C++ Standard Library feature that’s been voted into C++11, C++14, and C++17-so-far. Parser improvements were required to make that happen, in addition to a lot of great work from our libraries team. We’ve also fixed about 300 compiler bugs since Update 1, many of which address bad code generation in our compiler. We understand...
What’s inside a PDB File?
Background We have all used the Visual Studio Debugger to step through code, in the hunt for bugs. For C or C++ code, that Debugger relies upon a file, with the extension ".pdb", called the "Program DataBase", or simply "the PDB". The PDB is written by the Linker when you build your program; it contains line-number and symbols information. But what lies inside these PDBs, exactly? Most C/C++ developers need never worry about the answer. But for those few, working on tools such compilers, linkers, analyzers and verifiers, knowing the details can be useful. Especially where you want these tools to work within...
What's inside a PDB File?
Background We have all used the Visual Studio Debugger to step through code, in the hunt for bugs. For C or C++ code, that Debugger relies upon a file, with the extension ".pdb", called the "Program DataBase", or simply "the PDB". The PDB is written by the Linker when you build your program; it contains line-number and symbols information. But what lies inside these PDBs, exactly? Most C/C++ developers need never worry about the answer. But for those few, working on tools such compilers, linkers, analyzers and verifiers, knowing the details can be useful. Especially where you want these tools to work within t...
Your Version Control Experiences
The Visual C++ Team team would like to learn more about your source code management experiences across development tools, languages (especially C/C++), target platforms and project types. Please take a few minutes (~10) to fill out our brief survey http://www.instant.ly/s/wJqxc.The last question is an opt-in to share more details of your experiences with the C++ team. We would love to learn more about how you deal with source code in your environment, so please opt-in if you can spare ~15-30 minutes.Thank you!Eric and the Visual C++ Team
Top 10 reasons to use Visual Studio for C++ Android Development!
Visual Studio: C++ cross-platform mobile solution Visual Studio (download here) is fast becoming a cross-platform C++ IDE. Our vision is for Visual Studio to become the IDE of choice for your cross-platform C++ code whether you are targeting, Windows (UWP), Android, iOS, Linux, Xbox, PlayStation, Marmalade or more. In the past year or so, we have enabled support for Android, iOS (in preview) targeting, improved integration with the popular cross-platform game engine Marmalade, introduced a new compiler toolset (Clang/C2) for improving code portability between Windows and non-Windows plat...
VS 2015 Update 2’s STL is C++17-so-far Feature Complete
VS 2015 Update 2's STL is C++17-so-far Feature Complete
Clang with Microsoft CodeGen (January 2016) released
We have just released an out-of-band update of Clang/C2 toolset that brings in some of the community fixes as well as bugs found from testing. This is one of many rapid releases to come in the future, and issues reported from customers will be addressed progressively. Here we only list the changes since the previous release, for a more detailed discussion of the Clang/C2 toolset please read "Clang with Microsoft CodeGen in VS 2015 1". This update is still based on Clang 3.7 with some of the relevant community fixes cherry-picked (see below) and revises the version of C2.dll to 19.023413.0. Microsoft Fixes ...
Visual Studio 2015 Update 1: New Experimental Feature – MPX
Introduction This post is about Intel® Memory Protection Extensions (Intel® MPX) support in Microsoft Visual Studio* 2015; content provided by Gautham Beeraka, George Kuan, and Juan Rodriguez from Intel Corporation. Overview Update 1 for Visual Studio 2015 was announced on November 30, 2015. This update includes experimental compiler and debugger support for Intel MPX. Intel MPX can check all pointer reads and writes to ensure they remain within their declared memory bounds. This technology can detect buffer overflows and stop program execution at runt...