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Visual Studio 2010

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.