Showing archive results for 2018

Visual Studio 2017 contains support for std::string_view, a type added in C++17 to serve some of the roles previously served by const char * and const std::string& parameters. string_view is neither a "better const std::string&", nor "better const char *"; it is neither a superset or subset of either. std::string_view is intended to be a ki...

Containers allow developers to package up an application with all the parts it needs, such as libraries and other dependencies, and ship it all out as one image. This is especially useful for C++ cross-platform development – with containers you can choose to target a platform that runs on a completely different operating system than your developer ...

Containers encapsulate the runtime environment of an application: the file system, environment settings, and virtualized OS are bundled into a package. Docker containers have changed the way we think about build and test environments since they were introduced five years ago. Visual Studio’s setup and install expert, Heath Stewart, blogs regularly...

Last week we shipped the July 2018 update to the C/C++ extension for Visual Studio Code. In this update we added support for a new experimental API that allows build system extensions to pass IntelliSense configuration information to our extension for powering up full IntelliSense experience. You can find the full list of changes in the July 2018 u...

New to Visual Studio 2017 version 15.8, you can now set data breakpoints from within the Locals, Autos, Watch, and Quickwatch windows!  To view official documentation on data breakpoints, check out this post. Data breakpoints allow you to stop execution when a particular variable stored at a specific memory address changes.  Prior to version 15.8,...

Why re-write the preprocessor? Recently, we published a blog post on C++ conformance completion. As mentioned in the blog post, the preprocessor in MSVC is currently getting an overhaul. We are doing this to improve its language conformance, address some of the longstanding bugs that were difficult to fix due to its design and improve its usabilit...

This post was written by Olga Arkhipova and Xiang Fan Oftentimes, multiple projects in a Visual Studio solution use the same (or very similar) precompiled headers. As pch files are often big and building them takes a significant amount of time, this leads to the popular question: is it possible for several projects to use the same pch file which...

This post was written by Olga Arkhipova. Many big codebases use so-called unity (jumbo) builds where many source files are included in one or a few ‘unity’ files for compilation, which makes compiling and linking much faster. Just to avoid any confusion – this blog is NOT related to the Unity game engine. Looking at some customer feedback regard...

In Visual Studio 2017 release 15.8 Preview 3 we’re announcing support for Just My Code stepping for C++. In addition to previously supported callstack filtering, the Visual Studio debugger now also supports stepping over non-user-code. As you “Step In”, for example in an algorithm from the Standard library with a custom predicate or in a Win32 API ...

Visual Studio 2017 15.8 Preview 3 is now available and it includes several improvements to the CMake tools. In addition to a few fixes we have simplified the way you can configure your CMakeSettings.json file by adding configuration templates. If you are new to CMake in Visual Studio, check out how to get started. Configuration Templates for CMake...