C++ Team Blog
The latest in C++, Visual Studio, VS Code, and vcpkg from the MSFT C++ team
Latest posts
GCC / LLVM edit/build/debug survey
You, blog readers, are kind enough to answer our surveys and often provide extended feedback through individual conversations. Continuing to depend on your feedback and kindness, we are sharing another survey:The purpose of this survey is to gain a greater understanding of developers using GCC and LLVM based compilers either targeting Windows or Linux. The end goal is to gain a better understanding of your IDE needs focused on editing, building, and debugging. There are 11 questions and should take you less than 5 minutes to complete.Andrew and the rest of the diagnostics team appreciate your feedback! If you wan...
Cross-Platform MSBuild
Over on the .NET Blog: MSBuild is going cross-platform with .NET Core!The core principles of MSBuild haven’t changed much since it was launched in 2005, but the technology around MSBuild has evolved: multi-core processors are common-place now, much of our computing and storage needs are now met by cloud services with virtually unlimited resources, and many software projects have ballooned in size and are more difficult than ever to manage. We want to embrace these changes going forward. When looking at the next evolution step, we have a few goals in mind...Go over and take a look.Also, if you tried Vis...
New in VS 2015: /Zc:throwingNew
The C++ Standard defines operator new as failing by throwing an exception – not returning null. And indeed, this is the behavior in VC++, and has been for a number of releases. But it hasn’t always been this way. Back in Visual Studio 6.0, the compiler returned null on an allocation failure. Starting in VS 2002 we switched over to throwing an exception as required, but provided a mechanism (nothrownew.obj) to support the old null-returning behavior. Why does this matter today? Well, ever since 2002, the compiler has had to guard against the potential of a null returned by operator new. So, in VS...
Introducing Visual Studio’s Eclipse Android Project Importer
Hello everyone! I am Stephanie Su, a Program Manager Intern from the Georgia Institute of Technology. The project that I have been working on this summer with Brett Gutstein, a Software Engineer Intern from Rice University, is now available on VS Gallery! The Eclipse Android Project Import extension is available for download for Visual Studio 2015 users. The goal of this extension is to streamline the process of migrating your existing Android projects to Visual Studio. Check out the demo video to see it in action. This is a pre-release feature so we would love for you to try it out and leave us some feed...
Cross-platform code sharing with Visual C++
With Visual Studio 2015, Visual C++ supports three new platforms: Universal Windows Platform (just announced), Android and iOS (more info). This is in addition to its continued support for Desktop, Windows Store and Windows Phone. During the bring-up of these new platforms, a key requirement for our team was to make sure that Visual C++ provides an easy way to reuse code across all these platforms. This post goes through the improvements we made in Visual Studio 2015 to streamline the reuse and code sharing throughout the edit-build-debug cycle for C++ developers. Today we’re also making available through...
Developing for Windows 10 with Visual C++ 2015
Getting Started Windows 10 introduces the new Universal Windows App platform, which allows a single codebase to be reused across multiple Windows 10 devices. An earlier blog post described the pre-release process of getting setup and some of the new features available in Universal Windows Apps. Now that Windows 10 RTM has released, the following steps will help you get your machine set up to develop Windows 10 apps using Visual Studio 2015 RTM. Project Properties for Selecting the SDK Version in Store Apps A couple new concepts have been introduced to the VC++ project system ...
Working on an Internet of Things Project? Take Our Survey!
Survey!The Visual C++ team wants to learn more about how developers create Internet of Things devices and applications. If you are currently or have recently been part of an IoT project and can spare around 15 minutes, please take our survey and share your experiences. It does not matter which tools you use; if you work on IoT projects, we want to hear from you!If you do take the survey, you can opt-in to share more details with the team. We would love to chat with you so consider opting in!Thanks!Eric and Marc
Setup Changes in Visual Studio 2015 Affecting C++ Developers
As mentioned in the Visual Studio 2015 IDE blog post, the setup experience of the product now provides more control to the user, for what does and doesn’t get installed. That blog post also talks about the rationale for this change and future direction for Visual Studio install experience. C++ is one of the features which is available as an optional install (not on by default). This ensures that non-C++ developers don’t have to pay the setup time and disk-space price for installing C++ bits that they don’t need. At the same time, C++ developers can still get the pieces they nee...
C++ Edit and Continue in Visual Studio 2015
We previously announced that we were working on support for Edit and Continue for both x86 and x64 in the default debug engine in Visual Studio 2015. Today we’re pleased to announce that Edit and Continue (EnC) is enabled by default in Visual Studio 2015 RTM. As a quick reminder, EnC enables you to make changes to your code when you’re stopped in the debugger, and have those changes applied when you continue execution without the need to stop debugging, recompile and run the application back to that location. In Visual Studio 2015 we’ve made great progress on satisfying this top customer reques...