AprilR's WebLog : C++

Fixing your VS 2010 Beta 2 help

AprilR — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 06:53:00 GMT

If you are experiencing problems with your Beta 2 help, you may need to repair it, especially if you had a prior tech preview installed.

The Help 3 team blogs tells you how to fix it:

http://blogs.msdn.com/help3team/archive/2009/10/21/how-to-repair-a-help-viewer-help-3-beta-2-installation.aspx

Good luck!

AprilR

Visual Studio Library Experience News

AprilR — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 06:48:00 GMT

Kim Wolk, the new Product Unit Manager for the online and offline Visual Studio help experience, has started a blog. You can get a good look under the hood and follow the developments in this area here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/kwolk

Enjoy~

AprilR

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

Another cool new VC++ 2010 feature: the next generation of buffer overrun protection

AprilR — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:41:00 GMT

See this cool Channel 9 video with one of my favorite peeps - Louis Lafreniere - VC++ 2010 is shaping up to be quite a release!

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Louis-Lafreniere-Next-Generation-Buffer-Overrun-Protection-gs/

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

VC++ Blog Tour Stop: Conclusion

AprilR — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 04:15:00 GMT

Okay, so I know that this tour stop took months, but I hope that you have found the information useful. There are always more resources being posted online, but if you see something missing, please let me know and I'll see what I can do about it!

Parting words:

Visual C++ 2005 has something for everyone. What does it have for you? Recall all that I have posted about:

Decide if product support, performance and security are important to you, and if so Upgrade Today!
Enjoy the productivity enhancements found in the IDE
Speed up your app
Leverage all of our security features
Update to the new deployment and servicing model
Check out the .NET Framework and see what it can do for you
Even if you don't plan to compile for 64-bit soon, remember to compile 64-bit clean

That's it. That's the tour.

- april

VC++ Blog Tour Stop: Content Part 6: Roadmap to Taking Advantage of Hardware

AprilR — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 02:35:00 GMT

You are either tired of hearing about it or you are sleeping under a rock, but like it or not, hardware is changing. Not just from 32-bit to 64-bit, but the fundamental structures are all up for a make-over (not anywhere near the likes of what Trading Spaces has seen). We also see the omni-present device taking the headline spot in personal technology line-ups.

From the tour:

Concurrency

The Hardware - Adding cores to chips is what will make them faster in the future, clock speed is slowing to a crawl.
Intel and AMD both will ship multicore this year – within two years, most CPUs shipped will be multicore.

The Software - There are multiple types of concurrency for different tasks:

Data parallelism – Algorithmic concurrency, such as loops
Task parallelism – Traditional threading
Instruction level parallelism – Vectorization with SSE and SSE2

If you are not taking advantage of the concurrency your application performance will suffer. You’ll need to learn how to write parallel programs!

Data Parallelism: OpenMP

OpenMP is a specification for writing multithreaded programs
It consists of a set of simple #pragmas and runtime routines
Makes it very easy to parallelize loop-based code
- Can parallelize loops and straight-line code
- Includes synchronization constructs
Helps with load balancing, synchronization, etc…
In Visual Studio, only available in C++!

Task parallelism: Windows threading

Standard model of Windows threads and threadpool
Useful for invoking different threads to run different functions
Instruction level parallelism: The profiler and C++ optimizer
Without Visual C++ 2005 you will lose performance on future processors!

64-bit

The 64-bit Platform provides many benefits:
Vastly increased address space
OS has more resources (buffer sizes, handles, etc…)
Enhanced 32-bit performance on x64 (maybe surprising, but true)
Modern computer architecture – fewer limitations
Better programming model (No more PAE/AWE!)
Full use of 64-bit components

Devices

Devices are now first class citizens in Visual Studio 2005:

Same IDE as desktop platforms
Same source base for compilers and native libraries
Ability to target multiple platforms
Managed and Native projects in same solution
Debugging is like the desktop debugger

Again, there are really great sources for further information:

Herb Sutter's Blog - http://pluralsight.com/blogs/hsutter/

Kang Su Gatlin's Blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/kangsu/

64-bit Programming - http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/using/building/64bit/default.aspx

Windows Embedded Home - http://msdn.microsoft.com/embedded/default.aspx

Windows CE - http://msdn.microsoft.com/embedded/windowsce/default.aspx

VC++ Blog Tour Stop: Content Part 5: Roadmap to Using Managed Code

AprilR — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 01:44:00 GMT

De-myth-ifying Visual C++ .NET, Visual C++ .NET 2003 and Visual C++ 2005

On tour, we constantly battled the following myths and assumptions about our latest releases with regards to managed code:

1. MYTH: Visual Studio .NET 2002 and 2003 only include managed C++ compilers. - False! Non! No! We are proud and excited about the many features and new syntax focused on the .NET Framework - and they come from very same compiler - cl.exe! Existing C++ code remains unchanged and continues without behavioral changes!

2. MYTH: There is nothing new for native C++ developers in any of the releases since Visual Studio 6.0. - False! No! Nein! Njet! If you are reading my blog, you alreay know that there have been many advances for C++ developers all over the map. From libraries to compiler, from conformance to security, from performance to servicing.

3. MYTH: To use the .NET Framework you have to completely rewrite all of your code. - False! Nie! Nu! No! You have options when it comes to leveraging the .NET Framework. You can compile part of your existing project, or all of it, into MSIL, as is! You can just choose to make new code managed, by either compiling it into MSIL or using new syntax.

Why managed code???

Running code on Windows without managed code has limitations:

Code can only be trusted based on digital signatures and the system can not sandbox privileges for processes
Libraries targeted at different language developers have to be written several times – once for each language
Applications written for one platform can not run on other platforms, such as devices, without recompiling
Data structures can not be easily versioned between DLLs
APIs have no rich type information for component models

The Common Language Runtime (CLR) provides solutions for these problems. The CLR makes a number of services available to applications:

Garbage collection and resource management

Cross-language development

Security demands for partially trusted code

Reflection on assembly at run-time

Making use of these CLR services requires additional language enhancements to C++ (enabled by /clr):

New type categories
Syntax for garbage collection
Syntax for properties and events

Of course this is with regards to managed versus managed, since there are some changes encountered on project/version upgrade with regards to conformance, library deprecation and security.

There are lots of great sources for getting familiar with managed code in Visual C++:

C/C++ CLI Migration Primer: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms235289(en-US,VS.80).aspx

Webcast on integrating .NET Code into existing C++ code:

http://www.heege.net/webcasts/ExtendingCPlusPlusCodeWithDotNETFeatures/default.html

How To: Compile a project to target the CLR: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms235635.aspx

MSDN2 on the syntax for targeting the .NET Framework: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/68td296t(en-US,VS.80).aspx

- april

VC++ Blog Tour Stop: Content Part 4: Roadmap to Securing C++ Applications

AprilR — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 01:04:00 GMT

This is an interesting subject to write about, for many reasons. Given that there are a lot of great resources on the web now, specifically about Whidbey even, I won't spend a lot of time or go into much detail here.

The main points we made on tour were:

Build security in layers
Use the features that improve security
Use the features that detect vulnerabilities

The layers of security that we discussed on tour were:

Block Attacker Access to the Machine - This includes taking actions such as enabling the Windows Firewall and using authentication for RPC. Using the most recent release of the Windows operating systems will make sure you have the latest security features - currently that means Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 SP1.

Prevent Security Bugs - Use the features that allow you to analyze your static code; replace risky libraries with more secure options; always, always, always validate data and remember to limit test. In Visual C++ 2005, we added more secure versions of the C++ libraries.

Mitigate Vulnerabilities - Use the features that improve runtime error detection and ensure you use antivirus monitoring software. With recent releases of Visual C++ this means compiling with /GS and /SAFESEH.

Service with Reliability - Make sure you can service what you ship; collect information about errors and buffer overruns. Take advantage of the Windows Error Reporting Tool and remember to use the new deployment model that I wrote of in September.

Resources:

Michael Howard's (the security guru of Microsoft) Blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/michael_Howard/

Libraries team blogs: http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/martynl/ and http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/nikolad/

MSDN2 Documentation on Security Best Practices - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-US/library/k3a3hzw7(en-US,VS.80).aspx

MSDN2 Documentation on Deployment - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/zebw5zk9(en-US,VS.80).aspx

Keep your Microsoft software up to date- http://update.microsoft.com

Windows Error Reporting - http://oca.microsoft.com/en/welcome.aspx and http://www.microsoft.com/resources/satech/cer/

- 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.

C++ Students: Respond and Win!

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

I posted a query awhile back to students and hobbyists, and I'm hoping to get a few more of you to respond by offering prizes! I've got random C++ SWAG and some free copies of Visual C++ 2003 Standard to send out to random prize drawing winners...here are my queries for you:

1) What tools do you LOVE in playing around with developer tools?

2) What is the #1 feature you would ask the Visual C++ team to add in the next release?

3) What has been or is the hardest concept for you to learn - be it about compilers, developing, debugging....?

Are you still targeting Windows 98?

AprilR — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 10:12:00 GMT

In talking with some customers here at PDC, I heard a lot of them say that Windows 98 continues to be their lowest common denominator in developing for their customers. This is interesting to hear about, because we are of course planning for future releases and are always looking at the list of platforms that we need to support, both in terms of run time and design time. So I thought this would be a fun thing to post as a query to you blog browsers, to see how many of you still have a lot of customers still using Windows 98. So let me hear it - who is still targeting Windows 98?

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.