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Visual Studio

Visual C++ 2010 Beta 1

Vi­sual Stu­dio 2010 Beta 1 was re­leased yes­ter­day for MSDN sub­scribers. Prob­a­bly the most an­tic­i­pated re­lease in a while for C++ de­vel­op­ers, 2010 is Mi­crosoft's at­tempt to give C++ first-class sup­port, some­thing which hasn't been seen since Vi­sual Stu­dio 6.0.

Up­date: down­loads are now avail­able for non-MSDN sub­scribers.

On the com­piler side of things, we get par­tial C++0x sup­port in the form of lambda ex­pres­sions, rvalue ref­er­ences, auto, de­cltype, and sta­tic as­sert. The fea­tures are piled on with an im­proved TR1 li­brary—fi­nally in­clud­ing the much re­quested stdint.h and cst­dint head­ers, but still lack­ing int­types.h.

Also in­cluded is the Par­al­lel Pat­terns Li­brary, a new task-based con­cur­rency li­brary that makes heavy use of the C++0x fea­tures for a nice mod­ern de­sign. I men­tioned be­fore that on Win­dows 7 this will make use of a User-mode sched­uled thread pool so it should be re­ally ef­fi­cient. Un­for­tu­nately given its pro­pri­etary na­ture I'm not sure how much use it will get.

The first thing you will no­tice on the IDE side is the in­line error check­ing. Some­thing we've en­joyed while edit­ing C# for some time, we now get the red squig­gly lines when an error is found. It works fairly well, but sup­port for lambda ex­pres­sions has not been writ­ten yet.

In­tel­lisense has markedly im­proved since 2008. Using ad­vanced C++ or a Boost li­brary no longer guar­an­tees it break­ing. It has worked with nearly all the C++ I've thrown at it so far.

You can also see an Ex­ter­nal De­pen­den­cies vir­tual folder added to your pro­ject source, which is dy­nam­i­cally filled with all the files In­tel­lisense will scan. I've found it is not ter­ri­bly use­ful, though, be­cause even with small pro­jects the header count in­creases rapidly enough to make the vir­tual folder be­come an un­in­tel­li­gi­ble mess.

The prob­lem is only ag­gra­vated by li­braries like Boost, which have hun­dreds of head­ers or­ga­nized nicely in fold­ers. Putting them into a sin­gle vir­tual folder just doesn't work.

This re­lease also marks the move to the ex­ten­si­ble MS­Build sys­tem for C++ pro­jects, which aims to pro­vide func­tion­al­ity sim­i­lar to GNU make in an XML for­mat.

Per­haps the most ob­vi­ous change for the over­all IDE is that the main UI is now done en­tirely in WPF. It sounded like a de­cent plan at first but I'm not too happy with it now. Minor dif­fer­ences from the way na­tive con­trols be­have can be pretty an­noy­ing, and the five to twenty sec­ond load time makes it less use­ful for open­ing ran­dom .cpp files when 2008 would load them in one or two sec­onds.

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 in four days

Vi­sual Stu­dio 2010 Beta 1 is being launched for MSDN sub­scribers in four days on the 18th, and for the gen­eral pub­lic on the 20th!

Visual Studio 2010 CTP now available

Co­in­cid­ing with the 2008 PDC, the first Vi­sual Stu­dio 2010 CTP is now avail­able for down­load. At first glance, it in­cludes a few in­ter­est­ing things for C++:

• Par­tial C++0x sup­port: lambda ex­pres­sions, rvalue ref­er­ences, sta­tic as­ser­tions, and “auto” are now sup­ported.
• Re­vamped In­tel­liSense: now faster and more ac­cu­rate.
• Par­al­lel Pat­tern Li­brary: a mod­ern C++ li­brary that al­lows eas­ier and safer use of today’s multi-threaded com­put­ing.

I’ll be post­ing more as I take a closer look at these and other fea­tures.

Visual Studio incompatibilities

Hope­fully some­one read­ing this won’t have to waste a few days try­ing to fig­ure this stuff out:

If you in­stall Vi­sual Stu­dio 2008 Team Ex­plorer, you’ll want to in­stall it be­fore VS2008 SP1 or stuff will break.

In­ter­net Ex­plorer 8 Beta 2 breaks the Win­dows Mo­bile 6 SDK Re­fresh—try to click on Plat­forms in the pro­ject cre­ation wiz­ard, and it’ll can­cel the di­a­log. Unin­stalling IE8 (Con­trol Panel->Pro­grams->View in­stalled up­dates->Win­dows In­ter­net Ex­plorer) fixes the issue.

RTM hits for SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 SP1, .NET 3.5 SP1

SQL Server 2008, Vi­sual Stu­dio 2008 SP1, and .NET 3.5 SP1 have all been RTMed!

Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack is now available

The Vi­sual C++ 2008 Fea­ture Pack I talked about be­fore is fin­ished and ready for down­load. This in­cludes a bulk of the TR1 up­dates (sadly, still no cst­dint) and some major MFC up­dates.

Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack beta

It’s here! A beta of the promised TR1 li­brary up­date has been put up for down­load.

In­cluded in the pack is an up­date to MFC that adds a num­ber of Of­fice-style con­trols. Wish they’d put these out as plain Win32 con­trols, be­cause I’ve got no in­ten­tion of using MFC!

Visual Studio 2008 released, TR1 support coming

Any­one fol­low­ing Vi­sual Stu­dio 2008 will know that al­though it of­fers a plethora of new fea­tures for the man­aged world, there was lit­tle focus on the un­man­aged side of things. Now that it is fi­nally out the door, I guess it’s a good time to look at what few new fea­tures are there for us un­man­aged C++ coders.

• Im­proved stan­dards con­for­mance with sup­port for friend tem­plates, an un­com­mon but pow­er­ful C++ fea­ture.
• In­trin­sic sup­port for SSSE3, SSE4.x, and SSE4a. These are mod­ern vec­tor in­struc­tions (SSE4a lit­er­ally just came out with AMD’s Phe­nom proces­sors!) that any­one in­ter­ested in writ­ing high‐per­for­mance code will want to be fa­mil­iar with.
• In­trin­sic sup­port for the CM­PX­CHG16B in­struc­tion. This in­struc­tion is es­sen­tial when writ­ing many lock-free al­go­rithms for the x64 plat­form. I’ve been lob­by­ing to have it added for a long time, so I’m es­pe­cially happy to fi­nally see it. Un­for­tu­nately, the gen­er­ated code in Beta 2 was very sub‐op­ti­mal (con­sid­er­ing the in­struc­tion is typ­i­cally used in very tight loops) so I may end up using as­sem­bly any­way! I’m anx­ious to see if it is im­proved in RTM.
• Im­proved op­ti­mizer, with sup­port for in­lin­ing tran­scen­den­tal func­tions and sched­ul­ing for the lat­est CPUs.
• Linker op­tions up­dated for Vista – abil­ity to spec­ify UAC and ad­dress space ran­dom­iza­tion prop­er­ties. For some rea­son, still no sup­port for DPI in­de­pen­dence so we’ll end up writ­ing man­i­fests any­way.
• We can fi­nally use those quad‐core CPUs that are com­ing out to re­duce our com­pile times with Multi‐threaded com­pil­ing.

Not much, huh? That’s be­cause Mi­crosoft was run­ning under the as­sump­tion that peo­ple would flock to C# and only use un­man­aged C++ to main­tain "legacy" code. Per­haps the best news so far, they’ve fi­nally re­al­ized their mis­take. Al­though they didn’t have time to put things into VC++ 2008, they have re‐com­mit­ted to un­man­aged code for the next ver­sion and in the mean­time made a small sep­a­rate an­nounce­ment that they will be bring­ing VC++ 2008 users a mostly com­plete TR1 im­ple­men­ta­tion up­date in early Jan­u­ary.