C++ Renaissance: a Channel 9 Interview

re: C++ Renaissance: a Channel 9 Interview

Douglas Zhao — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 03:47:43 GMT

I wish the all the channel 9 video have the subtitiles,becuase not all people from English speaking country.Sharing the knowledge all over the world is a good thing.

re: C++ Renaissance: a Channel 9 Interview

Charles Torre — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 17:28:48 GMT

@jalf: that's a great question.

Here are a few places to converse/send feedback to the WP7 team:

answers.microsoft.com/.../phone

www.windowsphone7.com/.../index.aspx

www.facebook.com/windowsphone

twitter.com/winphonesupport

I do know that the WP7 people actively monitor and engage in these communication streams. Twitter, of course, will limit the dialogue to 140 chars.

Speak up, please!

re: C++ Renaissance: a Channel 9 Interview

jalf — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 06:39:45 GMT

@Charles: out of curiosity, how exactly does one do that? I don't see them on Connect.

(And why is it that the Microsoft product teams that most desperately need feedback are the ones it's impossible to contact?)

re: C++ Renaissance: a Channel 9 Interview

Charles Torre — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 21:42:10 GMT

@David: I think the WP7 team have revolutionized Microsoft's smartphone business..Much kudos to them for this. I have no idea what the future plans are for native support on Windows Phone. You should send feedback to the WP7 team. :)

re: C++ Renaissance: a Channel 9 Interview

David — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 20:09:53 GMT

Contrary to C++ renaissance Nokia in coordination with MS has just doomed whole C++ generation of programmers and their working code base with it's "secure" and "sandboxed" Windows Phone 7:/ I hope there will be a chance for "unmanaged" code sooner or later for WP7, .

See the report here: blogs.forum.nokia.com/.../letter-to-developers

re: C++ Renaissance: a Channel 9 Interview

Chris — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 13:50:39 GMT

I agree that this recent activity on the web is promising. We need more people at MS like Charles, Diego and STL.

The IDE needs to be better segregated between native and managed development. Why can't it refactor c++ code like it can with c#? Why can't it browse obj and lib files? Why aren't all the .h file function declarations commented? Intellisense is great, but learning by exploring is even better. You can do this with c# (most of the time) but not with c++ because you have to open _slow as balls_ MSDN to learn what functions do.

re: C++ Renaissance: a Channel 9 Interview

Reza Jahanbakhshi — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 11:50:54 GMT

There is lots of activities in vcblog and C++ in channel9 recently and it's really promising.

Thanks to Charles and Diego. Keep doing the good work.

In my opinion VC debugger and it's IDE integration is number 1. The VC compiler and standard library implementation are really good but the IDE is bloated, unstable and slow.

re: C++ Renaissance: a Channel 9 Interview

Jasper — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 02:16:46 GMT

The "core language" thing @Andrew posted caught my eye as well. Apparently, people outside the VC++ team don't see C++ as quite as important? ;)

As for C++ being "first class" in VS, that might more or less be the case technically speaking, but it has still been badly neglected in terms of the IDE. In a lot of ways, it's still the same old C (or, if you're feeling generous, C-with-classes) IDE it was 12 years ago. Only slower and much more memory hungry (no doubt a big part of which isn't VC++'s fault, but is a side effect of being part of a suite that packs so much cruft aimed at managed languages)

Where are the IDE features that support *modern* C++?

In fairness though, I want to be clear that this criticism only applies to the IDE. The compiler has improved a lot over the years (although of course, it can never be good *enough*, can it? ;))

But really, the way I see it, and from what I've heard, I'm not alone, VS for C++ developers ens up scoring something like this:

Debugger: 9.9/10 - best in class, and a pleasure to use (the last 0.1 is because I'd like to see more robust handling of templates; inspection of template types or constants, for example)

Compiler: 6/10 - generally speaking, good enough, fast enough, compliant enough. But not really remarkable given the competition.

IDE: 1/10 - bleargh... slow, bloated, the project system is crippled and restrictive, the wizards set you up with all the wrong settings, several features are *exposed* to C++ projects, but don't actually work (because they're for managed code only), and, as I said, the IDE has quite good support for C, but very little for C++. Oh, and it crashes. I can't really see much in it that's worth keeping.

Given that the compiler works fine from the command line, I only really use the IDE because of the debugger integration.

re: C++ Renaissance: a Channel 9 Interview

Mark — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 22:38:00 GMT

@AndrewDover

You are right, there is a bunch of new technologies in Windows 7 (Direct2D and DirectWrite, WWSAPI, Ribbon, Taskbar, Libraries, Sensor and location, etc.) and the only way to get the most out of them is by using native C/C++, the APIs are not primarily designed for .net developers.

However, I'm kind of puzzled to see that the only book published by Microsoft Press about Windows 7 is an introductory level book (Introducing Windows 7 for developers) and that half of the book is dedicated to the API code pack which has nothing to do with Windows itself...

I'm not a huge fan of QT, my guess is rather that Microsoft (the Windows teams?) is working on a new UI library and application model that will focus (not exclusively) on native development. Part of the C++ team might be working on bringing inside Visual Studio the appropriate tools to write these new applications....

re: C++ Renaissance: a Channel 9 Interview

AndrewDover — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 20:00:33 GMT

I do see positive signs from Microsoft for C++, and native development such as:

Web Services API msdn.microsoft.com/.../dd430435(VS.85).aspx

Parallel Patterns Library msdn.microsoft.com/.../dd492418.aspx

My guess is that Microsoft will end up partnering with Nokia and do QT as the C++ high level libraries, and keep the Windows API as the lower level C API.

However, if C++ is first class in VS, what is the ratio of developers working on C++, C#, and VB libraries and tools ?