C++ Team Blog

The latest in C++, Visual Studio, VS Code, and vcpkg from the MSFT C++ team

New Features in C++/CX's <collection.h> for VS 2013 RTM

Introduction: Hi, I’m Brandon Jacobs, an intern on the Visual C++ Libraries team. For part of my internship, I was tasked with adding new features to Stephan T. Lavavej’s <collection.h>. It was certainly an honor to be one of the few to contribute to <collection.h>. You can find these changes in VS 2013 RTM (these ...

C++/CX Part 4 of [n]: Static Member Functions

See C++/CX Part 0 of [n]: An Introduction for an introduction to this series and a table of contents with links to each article in the series. In this article, we'll take a look at static member functions and how they are supported by the Windows Runtime. A Windows Runtime reference type (also called a ref class in C++/CX, or a runtime class) ...

C++/CX Part 3 of [n]: Under Construction

See C++/CX Part 0 of [n]: An Introduction for an introduction to this series and a table of contents with links to each article in the series. In this article, we'll take a look at the how runtime classes are constructed. We'll use the following runtime class throughout this article: This type has both a default constructor and a constructor...

C++/CX Part 2 of [n]: Types That Wear Hats

See C++/CX Part 0 of [N]: An Introduction for an introduction to this series. The hat () is one of the most prominent features of C++/CX--it's hard not to notice it when one first sees C++/CX code. So, what exactly is a type? A hat type is a smart pointer type that (1) automatically manages the lifetime of a Windows Runtime object and (2) ...

C++/CX Part 1 of [n]: A Simple Class

See C++/CX Part 0 of [N]: An Introduction for an introduction to this series. In this article we'll consider the basics of C++/CX by looking at a simple Windows Runtime class; we'll skim over some of the details, but don't worry: we'll come back and cover them in future posts. The code in this post is complete, though some namespace ...

C++/CX Part 0 of [n]: An Introduction

Hello; I'm James McNellis, and I've recently joined the Visual C++ team as a libraries developer. My first encounter with the C++/CX language extensions was early last year, while implementing some code generation features for the Visual Studio 2012 XAML designer. I started off by hunting for some example code, and it suffices to say that...

Inside the C++/CX Design

(image) Hello. This is Jim Springfield, an architect on the Visual C++ team. Today, I want to give some insight into the new language extensions, officially called C++/CX, which was designed to support the new API model in Windows 8. If you attended //BUILD/, watched some of the sessions online, or have been playing with the prerelease of...