Hi, my name is Pat Brenner and I’m a software design engineer on the Visual C++ libraries team. I recently rejoined the Visual C++ team after almost 10 years in the Visual Studio environment team. I am also the owner of Spy++. While I did not originally...

Hi, my name is Alan Chan. I’m a software design engineer in Visual C++ libraries team. As the name suggests, my team owns some of the C/C++ libraries such as ATL, MFC, CRT, STL, and OpenMP. Today, I’m going to talk about one very interesting COM interop...

An interesting debate about C++ exceptions took place a few weeks ago in the C++ MVPs discussion list. The trigger was something as innocent and specific as “ would you guys just throw std::runtime_exception with some error message string or you...

Hello, My name is Rashid Sarwar and I am on Visual C++ Compiler Front End team. I have been on this team for several months and have learned many things on how to test a complier. In this post I will be sharing with you how we test our Visual C++ compiler...

Several customers have encountered the following error while using the Visual C++ compiler on Windows 7: fatal error C1859: 'stdafx.pch' unexpected precompiled header error, simply rerunning the compiler might fix this problem This error manifests...

Hello, I am Mohammad Usman, a Software Design Engineer in Test on the Visual C++ Libraries team. I recently joined the team. In VS 2008 SP1, we invested heavily in our Standard Template Library (STL) implementation by adding TR1 extensions such as shared_ptr...

This is one of those problems whose solution is very evident… or bitterly hard to guess depending on how much you were influenced by what you were told about it. I’ll paste here the case I must be getting blind, as I can’t...

Hi, I’m Lin Xu, a Program Manager working on the C++ compiler. Recently , we collated performance numbers from our testing passes over this release cycle. We track many different benchmarks closely for all of the architectures and switch options (...

Hello, my name is Li Shao. I am a Software Design Engineer in Test on the C++ team. For the past two years, I have been part of the team working on migrating the C++ build system from VCBuild to MSBuild as well as the new project system which is also...

As you may have seen, Soma announced today that Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop is now available for download . For C++ developers, the Express for Windows Desktop includes many of the new C++ investments we made in Visual Studio 2012,...

We got just published “ Developing Windows Applications in C++ ”, an article series created by C++ Most Valuable Professional Kate Gregory . This material is aimed at C++ developers who want to learn how to write Windows applications. It won’t...

We're back with the third installment of C9::GoingNative . At the recent //BUILD conference, we introduced a series of technologies targeting the upcoming version of the Windows platform. One of those consists in some extensions to the C++ language...

You may already know Pete Brown but if you don’t, I’ll briefly introduce him here: he’s, like me, a Community Program Manager with Microsoft but while I’m focused on C/C++ languages and the Visual C++ tool, he’s devoted to client-side development technologies...

Hi, my name is Andy Rich and I’m a QA on the C++ front-end compiler. The IntelliSense system in Visual Studio 2010 comes with far greater power, flexibility, and accuracy, but these improvements come at the cost of greater complexity. The goal of...

Introduction Hi, my name is Jim Hogg and I am a Program Manager, working in the Visual C++ compiler team in Microsoft, based on the main campus here in Redmond. More specifically, I work in the part of the compiler that optimizes your code, to make...

Hello, my name is Daofa Li, and I am on the Visual C++ QA team. In this post I will be sharing with you the improvements in Dialog Editor for Visual Studio 2010. In Visual Studio 2010, we have improved Dialog Editor in the following features: ·...

Thank you to everyone who has submitted feedback on the Visual Studio Release Candidate. We have received feedback that C++ Intellisense performance is slower. One way to improve this is to enable Pre-Compiled Headers usage for Intellisense parser. Andy...

Hi! My name is Ulzii Luvsanbat and I’m a Senior Test Lead with the Visual C++ team. Diego told me about some feedback received in a recent post regarding the accuracy and usefulness of the F1-Help command when working on C++ projects. First of...

Hi, my name is Jianhua Li, and I am a VC++ IDE QA. Today I am going to talk about VC++ IDE / Design Time stress testing. What is stress testing? Design Time Stress (DTS) is part of a broader set of reliability quality criteria focused on measuring...

A common question from programmers who have an intermediate amount of experience with using the STL is, "How do I write an STL allocator?". Writing an STL allocator is not especially difficult - only two member functions are interesting, allocate() and...

Hello, I’m Mark Hall, an architect in the Visual C++ group. I wanted to follow up on Jim Springfield’s previous blogs about the history of C++ intellisense, and some of the changes we’re making in upcoming Visual Studio 10 release. It’s been almost a...

Hello, my name is Chandler Shen, a developer from the Visual C++ Shanghai team. We have made some changes in the upcoming Visual C++ 2010 release to improve the performance of linker. I would like to first give a brief overview of the linker and how...

Hi, I’m Andy Rich, a tester on the C++ frontend compiler and one of the primary testers of the C++/CX language extensions. If you’re like me, making use of a technology without understanding how it works can be confusing and frustrating. This...

Hello, I’m Pat Brenner, a developer on the Visual C++ Libraries team, and I am the primary developer working on MFC. I’ve realized over the course of the past several years that a number of developers (especially those using ATL and/or MFC) can be confused...

My name is Hongwei Qi and I am a Software Design Engineer in Test on the Visual C++ compiler code generation team. In this post I want to share with you the enhancements planned for the GS feature in Visual Studio 2010. Evolution of GS A lot...