In the fourth part of my video lecture series introducing the Standard Template Library, I walk through an extended example of using the STL to solve Nurikabe puzzles. It assumes that you've read Wikipedia's Nurikabe page, and that you've watched Part...

In May this year, we announced Project Hilo and promised a set of cool sample applications written in C++. At that time we had released the first application in the Hilo series. Since then we have published some articles that walk the reader through all...

The third part of my video lecture series introducing the Standard Template Library is now available, following Part 1 and Part 2 . Part 3 covers unique_ptr , shared_ptr , and exception handling (briefly). It explains my solution to the container erasure...

My name is Ahmed Charles and I currently work on Windows Error Reporting. I believe that this is the first time that someone not on the VC team has written a blog, but I hope you will find it useful anyways. I’d like to thank Stephan T. Lavavej...

The second part of my video lecture series introducing the Standard Template Library is now available. This part covers the STL's associative containers and the erase-remove idiom. It assumes that you've watched Part 1 . More parts are on their way! Let...

The C++ back-end team is very conscious of the performance of our product. Today I will present to you an overview of how we define “performance of our product” and the way we measure it. Along the way I hope to introduce you to some new ideas...

I recently recorded the first part of a video lecture series introducing the Standard Template Library. It assumes familiarity with C++, but begins with the STL basically from scratch. Channel 9 hooked up my laptop so I could write, compile, and execute...

The Visual Studio Debugger Team is currently planning features for the next release of Visual Studio. We would like to hear from our C++ developers to make sure that their needs are understood. Please take a couple of minutes to complete the very short...

Recently we announced the availability of Visualization and Modeling Feature Pack for MSDN subscribers which complements the Architecture tools in VS2010. There is great C/C++ code visualization support in there. Read a blog post by Somasegar here: http...

Security is something we take very seriously and we work with a number of teams across the company to keep native apps as secure as possible. An example of this in Visual Studio 2010 was our work on the GS flag . One of our colleagues, Tim Burrell, who...

Hello, this is Jim Springfield. This post will cover some low-level details about how we represent information in the browse database in VS 2010. As I’ve mentioned in a previous post , we are using SQL Server Compact Edition (SSCE) for storing information...

My name is Alex Thaman and I am a Senior Test Lead on the Visual C++ compiler team at Microsoft. The focus of this blog is testing of the compiler backend where I’ve spent a good portion of my time here. For those not aware, this is the part of...

What is Hilo? Project “ Hilo ” is an effort to tell the story of building high performing, responsive rich Windows applications using C++. We will do this by walking you through our own experience of building some sample applications which we believe...

My name is Amit Mohindra and I am a Program Manager with the Visual C++ IDE team. In this post I would like to talk about project-to-project references. In VS2010 release we moved the C++ build and project system to be based on MSBuild. There is an excellent...

In VS 2008, Visual C++ had a couple of the simple scenarios called Custom Build Step and Custom Build Tool. This post will discuss a couple of the simple build extension options you have, and how they’ve changed since VS 2008. Andrew Arnott discusses...

Hi my name is Li Shao. I am a Software Design Engineer in Test for the C++ team. In my earlier blog “Visual Studio 2010 C++ Project Upgrade Guide”, I have mentioned about the change of Custom build Rules in VS2010. In this post, I would like to explain...

I am very happy to announce that Visual Studio 2010 is now officially available! The formal announcement can be found on Soma’s blog and you can download VS 2010 from here . Visual Studio 2010 is a great release for C++ developers. Top reasons you should...

Today at 11am (PST), Charles Torre will be interviewing Kate Gregory and Richard Campbell for C9 Live at DevConnections Las Vegas to dig into improvements in the native stack in Visual Studio 2010. All native developers are encouraged to tune in and tweet...

When we announced that the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate Is Now Available For Download , a reader, Igor, asked us to provide a table summarizing which C++0x Core Language features are implemented in VC10. So, here it is! It's derived from, but...

We know that build throughput for applications are a time crunch on developer productivity. We have spent some time on improving linker throughput and other areas in VS2010, and will continue to investigate improving overall build throughput in future...

Hello, I am Renin John, a Software Development Engineer in Test from the VC++ Project and Build team. I am aware that some of you prefer to do your daily work from the command prompt rather than from the IDE. I thought it would help if I put together...

With the Visual Studio 2010 launch around the corner, members of the Visual C++ team will be traveling around the world to meet with you and showcase the many new features Visual Studio 2010 has to offer for C++ developers. If we are coming to a stop...

Visual Studio 2010 has some enhancements that provide an easy way to get faster builds on a multiprocessor computer through parallelism. Dan Moseley a Lead Developer on MSBuild has written a blog on the C++ Build Parallelism in Visual Studio 2010 . Thank...

As we wrap up Visual Studio 2010, we are starting to plan the next release of Visual C++. Our goal is to make Visual C++ a product that meets your needs. Thus we need your help. We would like to better understand what you do. Please take a few minutes...

Hello, I’m Pat Brenner, a developer on the Visual C++ Libraries team. I’ve noticed some posts on various forums lamenting the loss of the ActiveX Test Container application and I wanted to address those concerns. The ActiveX Text Container tool is still...