AprilR's WebLog : C++ Team

Fun C++ history

AprilR — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 23:11:00 GMT

Rico Mariani has quite simply become one of my favorite people, professionally and personally. Not long after I first met him, as we started working on the problem of fixing Visual Studio help, about a year ago, I would describe him to people as the "Energizer Bunny" and the Master of Analogy. His energy and confidence are contagious. His technical chops are top notch, in depth and breadth, and even at this great company, not often matched. His ability to talk straight is refreshing. He'll call anybody's BS, no matter who is in the room when he does it. I've seen him seize moments to inspire people, and push people when they aren't pushing themselves hard enough (met with mixed reactions, depending on his tactics, my only minor criticism which I have to mention lest this become a complete suck-up post ;)). He's one of the few people that I have seen master rapid context switching between the tactical and the strategic. At the same time, Rico isn't one of these engineers that unhealthfully dedicates their entire 24/7 life to code. He's a husband and father, and has hobbies that make great use of his creativity and gregarious nature (I'll let him disclose those!).

All of this said to point you to a group of recent posts about his long history with Visual Studio and dev tools in general. I thought I'd highlight this one post that includes some fun C++ history:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ricom/archive/2009/10/06/my-history-of-visual-studio-part-2.aspx

Enjoy~

AprilR

Moving on again!

AprilR — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 23:10:00 GMT

Hey there blog readers :) Just a quick post to let you know that I am moving again - this time to Microsoft Surface

I have been in our Developer Division for 11 years; I have had a great time working on the development of Microsoft Help 3.0, and unforgettable times working on the Visual C++ team. I've enjoyed communicating with all of you over these past few years, too!

But, I am definitely ready to take on a new challenge. I'll be utilizing my project management skills and exploring application of recently learned skills from the UW Bothell MBA program in tackling a new product, business and customer base.

SO, if you want to keep up with the latest on Help 3, make sure you subscribe to the Help 3 team blog and if you use Twitter, follow @Help3! Soon we will be posting a great guide about the new "platform."

If you want to keep up with Visual C++, you probably already know about the C++ Team Blog.

Thanks for all of your comments and support. I hope you follow me to the new world of Surface, too!

April

Cool new C++ feature in Visual Studio 2010!

AprilR — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 19:15:00 GMT

Check it out this cool feature that my old team has - c++ squiggles!

Read Mitchell Slep's post all about it on the VC team blog -

http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2009/06/01/c-gets-squiggles.aspx

- April

Big Challenge, Broad Reach

AprilR — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 22:41:00 GMT

I want to share with you the mail that I recently sent to my team:

“This is not easy. Goodbyes are tricky and invariably ambiguous. Not like hellos. We all remember what Neil Armstrong said when he was the first man to land on the moon, but does anyone know what Eugene Cernan said when he left as the last man on the moon? Did he even promise to call?” - Bernie Lincicome, Rocky Mountain News Columnist [on saying goodbye to the old Mile High Stadium]

Last week I accepted an offer to become the Developer Division Help Experience PM. This job has a huge challenge - collaborating across many different organizations and disciplines to improve how developers find the information they need, and ensuring that the quality of that information is high when they get there. Many people in the division have put in a lot of time and energy into the help system and creating innovative help features, and in working to improve content. I hope and plan to make a significant contribution in streamlining and focusing these efforts. One of my first steps in my new role will be talking to folks around the division hearing your thoughts about the current and future help experience.

It is hard for me to say goodbye to this team. This is my second home, my extended family. I have spent over 7 years with you. But I don’t really view this as leaving a team as much as going to a new opportunity. The fact that I’ll be on the 6^th floor and not in some other building across campus makes it a little easier, as I will still get to see your faces and ask about you, your kids and everything.

Thank you to everyone in this organization who has helped me to grow into the leadership role that I have served in. And when asked if I think I’ll ever come back to the team, I’ll simply reply with a quote from Einstein: “I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.”

And so I started this new position this week (yes that is why you saw a flurry of posts last week ;) ). As such, you will find my blog transition to a home for the world of Help! I am still happy to take your questions and comments about Visual C++, I still know where to find the answers <g>. Soon I'll have a post asking for your feedback about Help and what you like/don't like about it. For now - cheers!

- April

VC++ Blog Tour Stop: Content Part 3: Making Your Application Better

AprilR — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 11:58:00 GMT

Optimizations

There are primarily two major optimization features in the 2005 release, whole program optimization and profile guided optimization, and also new specialized support for newer processors (/G7 for Pentium 4 processors) along with significantly improved mixed targeting and improved speed optimization and better precision of floating point operations. Because of the basic improvements in the compiler, you will see an average performance improvement in the range of 10-30%, depending on which version you are upgrading from.

Whole Program Optimization (/GL) has actually been available since 2002, but was significantly improved for 2005. By getting the compiler and linker to work together, we are able to begin optimizing programs by analyzing separate object files. While your link times may increase when using this feature, this too will yield an average improvement of around 30% when upgrading from 2002. This feature is widely used within Microsoft.

Profile Guided Optimization is new for 2005, and allows you to optimize your product for expected user scenarios. With PGO (we call it "po-go"), you instrument your project during a build, run your scenarios, and after one more rebuild, you have built your applications or components to be optimized for the user scenarios. Additionally, you can choose to just update your PGO build, so that you can build and rebuild only the parts of your project that have actually changed. PGO offers and additional 5-10% improvement over whole program optimization alone. This is use on large code bases at Microsoft, including Windows and SQL.

For more information about optimizations, check out these links:

C++ Rules: Power Your App with the Programming Model and Compiler Optimizations of Visual C++

Profile-Guided Optimizations with Microsoft Visual C++ 2005

Video: Using High Performance Features in Visual C++

Analyzing Your Application Source

You have probably heard by now of the many tools that will be available in the Visual Studio Team System products. With Visual Studio products targeting specific job roles - architect, developer and test, there are many new tools that will help you analyze and test your code. Some examples of the tools you will find in these product releases include static code analysis (PreFast), a profiler, and unit testing. Find out more here.

Improving Your Application Reliability

As I mentioned before, the 2003 release brought the VC++ compiler a long way in conformance. This helps enable you to use advanced code techniques and also to make code portable. The latest libraries also bring you reliability and safer functionality by using runtime check of parameters for values inside a value range and adding a new set of functions with safer signatures. We want to make sure that the libraries are service-able, so we have a new redistribution model.

Until the release of 7.0/2002, VC runtime redistributables were simply installed to the System or System32 folder. For 2002 and 2003, the recommendation was to install to your applications local directory instead, to start eliminating the problem of DLL hell. This didn't prove to be completely effective and also posed a huge servicing problem, which is very important as security becomes increasingly more important. You may recall the tact we had to use in servicing gdiplus.dll, where we had to ask all users to run a tool in order to detect all of the locations of the file that needed to be patched. Of course, as soon as you ran another old setup with an unsafe copy, you would have to go through the detect-and-fix process again.

In the 2005 release we now fully support the Windows Side by Side redistribution model (fusion) where a real versioning and servicing story comes to fruition. Additionally, we provide the tools to allow you to also distribute your components in this way, providing the same versioning and servicing support and also complying with Windows logo requirements.

Learn more from these sources:

Build More Secure Applications

Nikola Dudar's Blog

Deployment Documentation

Next Stop: More about securing your application

Compiler PM Back in Blog Action

AprilR — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 10:39:00 GMT

I just noticed that my peer, compiler program manager Brandon Bray, has started posting again :) After a long two year drought, Brandon is back, with two very cool posts - one about mixed types and the other about the compiler switch changes in 2005. If you had given up on him, keep an eye on his blog again.

PDC05 Day Three!

AprilR — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 09:49:00 GMT

Before I get started I want to point out a couple of items for tomorrow:

1) Herb Sutter's 10:30a.m. talk about C++ futures
2) The Meet the Visual C++ team event in the Tools and Languages track lounge at 1:30p.m.

I've started to see a few C++ specific questions come up frequently, so I'm sharing them with you:

"When will you have support for TR1?"
A: The TR1 specification adds certain class and function templates to the standard library. While we haven't added this support to our implementation of the standard library in the 2005 release, we have made sure the compiler will support them.

"What is the current state of the C++/CLI specification?"
A: I'm still learning about the standardization process myself, but relative to the process the specification is getting closer and closer to done. Herb Sutter posted about this in June.

"When can we expect C++/CLI support in the in the .NET Compact Framework?"
A: This is an interesting question for a couple of reasons. In some ways, the C# and VB support there makes a lot of sense since I think there are primarily web applications that are taking advantage of the framework. At the same time, we are senstive to the fact that once again legacy applications and components are written in C++. A good place to watch for this type of news is on Ami'ts blog.

"What is the future of MFC? Will you be doing any innovation there in the future?"
A: Steve Teixeira provide a short document in June on this, but the short answer is yes, we will continue to help customers move their MFC assets forward and be winning applications and components on Windows.

"I haven't upgraded to 2005 yet - will upgrading be painful? Is it backwards compatible?"
A: While every project is different, and your results may vary :), I have to say that we have seen a lot of success in getting customer projects upgraded in less than a day. That said, there are many changes that you will want to make as you get resources, for instance moving to the more secure CRT functions. This documentation will help educate you on the changes and issues you may face in moving to 2005.

As far as the PDC today, I spent a few hours in the lounge steering people to experts, and then a few hours at the Ask the Experts session answering C++ questions. The Ask the Experts session is a catered event where there are hundreds of tables marked with various technologies and products where Microsoft staffers and other experts hang out and answer questions, or chat with customers about everything from here to there. One odd site tonight was a giant cupcake. I'm not sure what the point of it was! I suppose it did probably draw attention to the nearby dessert table, but it still seemed a bit bizarre :) What wasn't bizarre was the giant Channel 9 Guy who I of course gave a big hug and got a snapshot.

Day Two Down - at PDC05

AprilR — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 12:30:00 GMT

It was another great day here at PDC, truly. Tonight was a fun event at Universal Studios which capped the day off nicely.

I have to start by saying, though, I'm feeling a bit punchy as I'm very tired and have been fighting my network connection here, where I have seen speeds so slow I nearly wish to stab my eyes out! Isn't it funny how we are so accustomed to our speedy connections? Take it away for even a moment and our blood pressure rises, our teeth grit and we want to physically punish our hardware, through no real fault of its own.

Beyond this issue I have to say that tonight I have definitely been feeling some customer pain. I have an issue for the team back home that I'm trying to help investigate, and I need a very tiny piece of the PSDK. Only trouble is, I can't get any of the PSDK setups to work for me because of the tough time I'm having securing even a reasonable amount of bandwidth. So I've searched everywhere and can't just find the small piece I need separately. All points on MSN Search point to PSDK downloads. On the Microsoft intranet I hoped I'd find a stray copy, but nope, all points to PSDK. I can't even get remote desktop working to my machine, where I do have the tool installed. It is incredibly frustrating, and I feel your pain!!!

So what happened at PDC today? Well, we saw a couple of very cool announcements - for Expression tools and for Visual Studio Tools for Applications. We had a lot of customer interest in the track lounge on these today. Generally we didn't have as good of a mix in the track lounge today, in terms of Microsoft staff, and it made it hard to get customers directed to the right people. Fortunately most folks were understanding and would just try to drop by later in the day. I don't think we had as many customers come through today, but there was a lot going on in terms of sessions and I am confident that is why. Tomorrow night we have the Ask the Experts, and I'm sure that will be quite busy.

Speaking of feeling your pain, I had to go from one end of the conference to the other today, and boy was that a walk! It took me 10 minutes of some serious crowd navigation just to get where I needed to be. I know that some of the events in the smaller rooms on one end required signing up for an appointment, so you could find yourself walking from one end, to the other where you signed up, back again and then once more for your actual meeting. That could be a lot of trekking! Still, it is better than two years ago when a lot of customer meetings were taking place in hotels.

Today I didn't really get much in the way of themes for common questions, but I do have two small bits of info to share with you PDC attendees out there:

1) The C++ IDE Tips and Tricks session that was supposed to take place on Tuesday at lunch has been rescheduled for Thursday at 1pm in 406AB,
2) The RC bits you are hearing about should be available at the material distribution booths after the keynotes.

Cool, yo'. Til Tomorrow.

Day 1 of PDC05!

AprilR — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 10:59:00 GMT

Well today was the first day of PDC, and it is off to a great start. I have to say my favorite part is meeting the broad spectrum of customers, partners and even other Microsoft employees that I don't normally interact with. This year my primary job at the PDC is helping customers and Microsoft folks connect in the lounge dedicated to the Tools and Languages Sessions Track. This track primarily features the Visual Studio teams in all of the various forms. We have a 30' by 40' space with tables, chairs, couches and several white boards, along with a podium that we use as a sort of concierge location, and we help get customers in touch with the experts they are looking for. I missed the keynotes because I was finishing some last setup work in the lounge, and so I got there around 9:00a.m. and left our last customers of the day at 9:20p.m. Since most of us didn't take time to eat all day, some of us from the Visual C++ team got together for dinner at the revolving cocktail lounge at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel. We talked about the customer issues we had heard during the day, about running as normal users on our home computers, then moved on to politics, the safety of hotel rooms, about our dev manager's experience many years ago when Bill Gates acknowledged him by name at a party, and then we were back on to work topics (loader lock issues). Then my thoughtful teammates walked me back to my hotel for my safety and, after relaxing a bit, here I am.

The most common general questions I answered today were:

"Where is the LINQ Whitepaper?"

A: We have lots of handouts, and I'm sure there are plenty of links online by now. People are stoked about what Don and Anders presented this morning.

"What do I have to do to get a hat?"
A: Take one out of the bin :)

"Where can I get a copy of the .NET Framework 2.0 poster?"
A: Turns out this will be in the Visual Studio box; for MSDN subscribers I'm finding out the plan here and will post back.

"Where is the ILL01 session?"
A: This is an Instructor Lead Lab and can be found on the big screens in the Hands on Labs area in the Big Room

"Which bits are in the pack we got and where is the RC?"
A: Jason Sutherland was a great resource for everyone who had questions about magic bits, and which went with which, and when others of this and that would be available. The media attendees got today has a variety of things that are currently building on the Beta 2 of Visual Studio, so Beta 2 of Visual Studio is what was included. Now, all this is great, but folks have had Beta 2 for awhile and are interested in seeing the near-final bits/RC of Visual Studio. These are already available on MSDN subscriptions downloads and attendees will get this media this week as well.

"So what's new in Whidbey/2005 for C++ developers? Which sessions should I attend?"
A: Blog readers know that my earlier posts talk about the first question, even if only generally right now. For sessions, check out our recommendations for the days that are all still to come (today's lunch sessions are being rescheduled):

TLN309 C++: Future Directions in Language Innovation with Herb Sutter
TLNL02 Tips & Tricks: Productivity Tips for the Visual C++ 2005 IDE
TLNL04 Tips & Tricks: C++ Optimization Best Practices
FUN318 Windows Vista: Using Win32/WinFX Integration to Light-Up on Windows Vista: A Case Study
PRS313 Windows Presentation Foundation ("Avalon"): Integrating with Your Win32/MFC Application
Hands on Lab: Integrating MFC and Windows Forms

So what else has been going on? I only stopped by the pre-conference sessions yesterday, as I was setting up. Before that it has proven to be an interesting trip for me! I have gotten lost on every single trip on L.A. freeways, but I've seen a lot of the area. I paid extra to upgrade my rental car to a convertable and it only took one day to get a sunburn :) I played golf for the first time in over three years (how is a 56 on a 9 hole par 3? not great! but I had a blast). I rented a bicycle and rode around the ever entertaining Venice Beach, drove through Beverly Hills and on the Sunset Strip and even saw the real Hollywood sign, which was fun. I absolutely adore my hotel - the Millenium Biltmore. It is a gorgeous art deco hotel with rich, albeit relatively recent compared to other parts of the country and planet, Hollywood and political history dating from the early 1900s. My room is classic and quaint, and I'll be back here again if I get a chance. Monday, as you may have heard, we had the fun of a short power outage in all of L.A., and I was very happy that I missed getting onto an elevator by only a moment. I took the stairs down from my 9th floor room, but did have an adventure actually finding my way out to the lobby and street, as many doors were locked and I had to play guess and check with routes and doors. Thank heavens it wasn't a fire situation (knocking on wood now!).

That's it. That's my PDC update for day 1. See you tomorrow!

On My Way to PDC05

AprilR — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 08:17:00 GMT

I can't tell you how busy we have been over the past few months, back in building 41, getting Visual C++ 2005 ready to go. It is always at this late stage in the game where complex issues and interesting bugs find their way onto our collective plate and one by one we investigate and do what we think is best for our customers (which sometimes means waiting to fix it right in the next release to avoid risk now).

But today, I get to think about how much fun I'm going to have next week. By day I've been helping the team to ship Whidbey, and by night I've been helping organize the design and staff for the Tools and Languages track lounge. We're going to have a great time.

Next week thousands of developers and hundreds of Microsoft engineers will come together to talk about what's new, what's hot and what get's everybody jazzed about the future in software. I hope you are going to be there, too, because the energy at this conference is amazing.

I haven't forgotten that I owe you all the rest of the C++ tour content. I hope to be getting to that very soon, but for the next week I'll be reporting to you live from the PDC in L.A. I leave tomorrow and have about twenty things on my to do list for tonight, so I'm going to get some coffee.

- AprilR

VC Team Release Candidate Drive Activity

AprilR — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 10:09:00 GMT

Many of you probably wonder what happens after a final Beta and before the final release. We will work to deliver a Release Candidate, which we will use to validate the resolution of Beta 2 issues that met the product "bar." Also, as we shut down the product for the Beta 2 release, there were some issues that we had to put on hold. Those issues are what the dev team have been working hard to get fixed, not just in VC but across the division. The QA team is adding any final tests and going through a few full test passes, where every test case on file is run (automated or manual). The PM team has continued evangelism efforts and now looks through the product issues to find which we can address now and which need more time to design and resolve. The division release team is watching over all of the teams very closely to make sure we are on track to shut down together and in time for a release later this year. Soon we'll start up our daily shiproom again, and I'll be giving you peeks into the types of issues we track and how we make our decisions.

-AprilR

Getting Ready to Go on Tour

AprilR — Sat, 16 Apr 2005 19:16:00 GMT

Well a few years ago saying this would mean something much different - I was in a band. That would have certainly been fun, but this is going to be pretty cool, too. The VC++ Program Management team has been out touring the United States and South America and soon we'll be treading around Europe. We are talking to our field offices, MVPs, RDs, and customers and making sure that the word about the 2005 Visual C++ is getting out. We are helping some customers begin to port their applications. I'll be helping out in parts of the Europe segment, and I'm excited. I'm not just excited because I love to travel, but I'm excited to be face to face with some of our customers again. This will be great! I think in my next series of posts I will share with you the content that we are covering on the tour - what's new, tips for migration, security roadmap, windows apps roadmap, making your app better, etc.

What the VC++ team does for fun

AprilR — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 03:16:00 GMT

Last year I got swept into the national craze with Texas Hold 'Em poker. As I was playing various friends and at the casinos, I wondered how many of my C++ teammates enjoyed the game, too. So last fall I set up a No Limit tournament open only to the VC++ team. Almost 25% of the team participated in the tourney and as soon as it was done I had people asking for another go 'round! So last Friday night we started the Spring Edition of the poker tournament. We have ~ %20 turn out this time, which is still pretty good.

Friday we had seven players: SCurrie - a former VC PM who has moved on to the division community team (who are responsible for Betas and the general story for getting our people in touch with you, our customers); Andy Rich, a fellow VC++ blogger (who, by the way, I nagged to post soon); Alex, a tester for the compiler back end; Bruce a developer for the IDE who has also worked on the build story for VC and parts of the toolset; AndyA, one of our compiler back end dev leads; Phil, a famous compiler front end developer who just may be one of the most knowledgable about the entire compiler and runtime, and another player, Dan Spalding, a sorely missed, recently retired developer who was linker god at Microsoft. Bruce brought fresh (still warm!) chocolate chip cookies, and Alex barely made it in time to start :0 We grooved to all kinds of music - from Frank Sinatra to Blondie to the Garden State Soundtrack (I'll leave out the part where they harass me for my music library which contains many fine offerings by Paula Abdul!). Scott and Andy were the last two remaining and now that I think about it I'm not sure who ended up winning. I think Andy had the chip lead when I went upstairs to check on my babysitter, and when I came back down I think they said Scott won. I'm not sure! Since the top two from the table advanced to the final table, I didn't confirm. I'm sure one of them will let me know after I post this :)

After that game, we started a second/consolation tourney with prize money going to the top three. I got to play in this game, but I didn't play for long. On the third or fourth hand Bruce made some big bets and I was just certain he was bluffing, but alas his diamond flush made a fool of fours with an Ace kicker :) I don't recall who went out when in this one, but I do know that Dan was happy to win top prize, leaving a with a bit more money than he arrived with.

april

Recall Class

AprilR — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 05:39:00 GMT

So to keep up with the project management in VC++ land, we are right now only fixing show-stopping bugs. We also call this period recall class mode, which means that we would recall the media for the bug fix. As the days of March get crossed off the calendar, we see our last few builds happening, and our last chance to find any big ~~bugs~~ defects :). We pay especially close to the risk of regressions in a main path. Many if not most of the bugs we have fixed in the past two weeks have been regressions caused by fixes we took three and four weeks ago. The team is glad to be making progress on post-Beta 2 work items as fewer and fewer people are involved in shutting down the Beta.

It helps the team's spirit that we have had a mild winter here in the Northwest - we've had many many sunny and dry days here that make it seem like it has been Spring for weeks. The bulbs are all blooming away - daffodils and such, plus tulips showing their first sign of color in my yard this afternoon. Beautiful!

april

What's the VC++ team doing right now?

AprilR — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 08:46:00 GMT

Are you wondering what the team is up to right now? Well, along with many other teams in the Developer Division, we are feverishly working to bring you our next Beta. We've been in what we call "Ask Mode" for four weeks now and have only taken around 65 fixes in that time. We still have 50-100 bugs that we would like to fix before we ship the Beta, but we are near the point where the overhead of Ask Mode is limiting our ability to do work for the product in whole. Ask Mode is the point where teams have to "ask" to make changes - even bug fixes - to the product. We are in shut down stabilization and we evaluate every change very closely to minimize the risk to this stabilization.

There are usually two stages to Ask Mode - product team level and division level. In the former the product team (so, the VC++ team) ultimately decides which bugs can get fixed; in the latter, our team has to ask approval at the division level to make changes. At both the product team and division levels, you have a group of people making the decisions that represents each area of the group, each function of the group and in some cases the managers for the group. The division group is basically made up of the division release team and product team reps. The product team reps are generally box PMs, test managers and some dev managers. Together we work on stabilizing together so we can eventually sign off and ship!

I'll say here that I owe you a post with an overview of the milestones that we use at the present time.

To get more specific about what our team is up to, I can tell you that we tend to see the product shut down in a sensible way - the "back-end," or, code-gen and tools team tends to shut down first, with the "front-end," or language compiler, not far behind. The libraries and IDE teams tend to stabilize after the base stops moving. We meet each morning for a team triage of Ask Mode issues and decide which fixes we want to take to the division triage in the afternoon. We discuss a lot of things: the customer scenario and how common we think it is, whether or not the problem is a regression, what root cause for the problem is, the code diff for the fix, the testing coverage, the risk of the fix and the impact of not taking the fix. All of this information together with a "bug bar" helps us make our decision. A bug bar is a list of criteria that describes the kinds of bugs we should be fixing at this point of the Beta cycle.

The test team is completing a full test pass (full meaning they run every test they have including manual test cases) to report a full status of quality. We track quality on several different metrics, and that is another post I will owe you (or maybe I'll revive the Five Testers from VC to tell you about the metrics!).

april