C++ Team Blog
The latest in C++, Visual Studio, VS Code, and vcpkg from the MSFT C++ team
Latest posts
All about C++ Refactoring in Visual Studio 2015 Preview
Hello C++ World! Update (1/6/2015): Check out all these features in action -- as well as how they've been improved since Preview -- in this video! With Wednesday's release of Visual Studio 2015 Preview, we are pleased to present you with new and improved coding productivity features, not the least of which is (finally) Refactoring for C++! Special thanks goes out to you folks who tried out the Visual Studio "14" CTPs and left us feedback; we tried to incorporate as many suggestions as we could in time for Preview, and we will continue to polish the features! I wanted to take some time to call out the refa...
Visual Studio 2015 Preview is Now Available
Today with the Visual Studio 2015 Preview, one of the big things we've done is improved the C++ experience, adding support for targeting Android, boosting runtime and build-time performance, improving standards compliance, and improving the editor experience. The Preview is available here for download and as a VM that you can run in Azure (if you're an MSDN subscriber, you get 150 hours of Azure for free).Let's go deeper on what's in the release! In Visual Studio 2015 Preview, you will be able to target Windows 8.1 Phone and Store along with Windows 8.0 Phone development. See C++ Tools Acquisition for Window...
Improvements to Warnings in the C++ Compiler
We made a number of improvements to C++ compiler warnings in Visual Studio 2015 Preview.The printf family of functionsThe community has made it clear that printf and its cousins are still heavily used and would benefit from more rigorous diagnostics when used. In Visual Studio 2015 Preview, the compiler will check that the number of arguments you provide to these functions match the number of arguments expected by the format string: printf("%d %dn", 1); //C4317 printf("%dn", 1, 2); //C4422 The compiler will emit:warning C4317: 'printf' : not enough arguments passed fo...
Resumable functions in C++
Last year, in a CTP release, we had provided a glimpse into resumable functions and await support in the Visual C++ compiler. In Visual Studio 2015 Preview we have gotten further along that journey and provided a more general purpose solution. This Preview release provides experimental implementation for a proposal called "Resumable functions" for the ISO C++ Standard. This is still work in progress but we believe this is the right time to open up the discussion and seek design feedback. An excellent overview of the topic is already available through this CppCon video. The slides from that presentation are also a...
Cross-Platform Mobile Development with Visual C++
Overview Modern application customers are demanding applications be available for multiple device platforms (such as Windows, Android and iOS). Today there exist multiple approaches in writing applications which target these device platforms. One approach is to simply create multiple versions of the application in different source trees-in other words a Windows specific version, an iOS specific version and an Android specific version of the application programmed to the native technologies available on the platform. While this is a simple straight forward approach it amou...
C++ Tools Acquisition for Windows Phone and Store Development
Through this blog post we wanted to inform you that C++ apps in Visual Studio 2015 Preview will be able to target Windows 8.1 Store and Phone development along with Windows 8.0 Phone development. Everything mentioned below is relevant only for Windows Store and Windows Phone apps. To provide this experience for the users VS 2015 pulls in the latest versions of VS 2013 and VS 2012 C++ compiler tools, headers, libs, project settings and other tools to help target Windows 8.1 Store/Phone or Windows 8.0 Phone respectively. Installation In Visual Studio 2015 Preview you will be able to target Windows 8.1 Phone...
Speeding up the Incremental Developer Build Scenario
Overview One of the major focus areas for Visual C++ lately has been improving developer productivity. Keeping this in mind a plethora of improvements have been introduced with Visual Studio 2015 preview (download here) aimed at the developer incremental scenario. The developer incremental scenario is one where a developer changes a single or multiple source files (while fixing bugs) and builds. This scenario for Visual C++ is roughly equivalent to the amount of time spent in linking the portable executable (.dll or .exe). Naturally so, the features being talked about in this blog are mostly in the linker ...
Details About Some of the New C++ Language Features
When you read our release notes, you'll notice that we've added a large number of C++ language features. The details of what these features are can be found all over the web, but what purpose they serve might still be nebulous. This article will attempt to explain the origins of and how to use a few of these new language mechanisms for best results.Terse Range-Based For Loops[Note 11/12/2014 1:00pm PST: This proposed feature was approved by the Evolution and Core Working Groups in June 2014, and it was implemented in VS 2015 Preview and Clang 3.5, but the full Standardization Committee rejected this feature on No...
CppCon Videos Available
In case you missed CppCon or attended but missed a few sessions (or want to review), videos for most of the talks are available on You Tube. There is plenty there for developers of all experience and temperament including: Presentation Slides, PDFs, Source Code and other presenter materials are available on GitHub.