My Article “Advanced C++ Tips and Tools” on AmazonMy article “Advanced C++ Tips and Tools” is live on the tech.book(store) website of Amazon.
You can read the full article here.  Next BeCPP UG Meeting Planned For June 12th, 2013The next meeting of the Belgian C++ Users Group is planned for Wednesday June 12th, 2013 at 18:00 at Nikon Metrology HQ. Nikon Metrology ( http://nikonmetrology.com/ ) is sponsoring this event by providing the location, drinks and catering. 
The agenda is as follows:
Read the official announcement. Community Day 2013The Belgian community is organizing the 7th edition of Community Day! Community Day 2013 will take place on June 20th 2013 in Utopolis Mechelen. 14 user groups will outperform themselves to bring you their view on Microsoft products in more than 25 sessions. 2013 is not a release year for Microsoft so far, so that gives us, the community, the opportunity to do deep-dive sessions in interesting topics. The biggest goal of this edition is bringing you high-quality sessions. And we’re pretty sure we have achieved that. Why don’t you take a look yourself at our agenda? Oh and don’t forget to take a look at our sponsor page, because it’s thanks to them we can organize this great event! Convinced you need to be part of the experience again? Want to register? Great! Registration opens in the second week of May so come back soon to reserve your seat. Remember that last year, the event was sold out very fast, so make sure you’re on time! The Microsoft Community Day 2013 is powered by:
We hope to see you on June 20th! Join the Belgian Windows 8 apps raceAnd win prices  Microsoft MVP VC++ 2013 AwardI got the confirmation email from Microsoft that my MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award for Visual C++ is extended for 2013
Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 Now AvailableMicrosoft has released Update 2 for Visual Studio 2012 (VS2012.2). You can get it here.
Check out Somasegar’s blog post for more details on this update. Meeting C++ 2013 AnnouncementAfter last years great success, there will be a Meeting C++ 2013 with 2 days full of C++ in Germany this Fall. Meeting C++ 2013 will be again at the 2nd weekend of November (8/9.11.2013). This time the conference will take place at the Lindner Congresshotel in Düsseldorf. For this year there will be 25 talks and up to 2 keynotes for the 250 attendees at the conference! Like last year, this event is organized independently, covering most its costs over the ticket price. There will be 3 tracks about C++ this year, with the 3rd track being a theme track about C++ and UI. Talks about Qt5, XAML, wxWidgets, GTK, Apps and QML could take place in this theme track. The other two tracks will offer general C++ talks like last year. Meeting C++ 2013 is looking again for sponsors, with sponsors from last year already being contacted. The call for papers for Meeting C++ 2013 has started and will end on May 15th. The process will be a bit different then last years. Talks will be collected, and then anonymously rated by a Program Committee consisting out of community members, organizers and sponsors. All ratings will be combined and used to do the final placement in the schedule. Speakers will have the opportunity to publish an entry about their talk at our blog this year! Tickets will be available soon, starting with the early bird ticket sale. This year there will be 250 tickets available for the conference, early bird tickets will cost €399, normal tickets €499. Early bird tickets will be sold till the end of June, after the schedule is available for one month, or till the 100 available tickets are sold out. Superhackathon in Belgium
Code, build, eat, drink & win. Experts will be on site to help you with the last phase of building your first Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8 application. The event will be streaming live everywhere to the world. There will be experts (many!), breakfast, pizza, coffee (lots!) and Red Bull. You can win prizes and rewards such as tickets to TechEd, Asus Vivo Tab, Lumia Phone and more. Boost.Asio C++ Network Programming
I love the Boost libraries, and I’m interested in network programming, so I decided to read this book. The book has a hands-on approach with a couple of sample programs. What I like is that these sample programs have been structured in such a way so they can be reused for your own projects. They are like skeleton examples, and all source code can be downloaded from the book’s website. The book does not cover any real networking theory. For example don’t expect an in-depth discussion of how the TCP, UDP, or ICMP protocols work; that’s not the goal of this book. The goal is to show, with practical examples, how to use the Boost.Asio networking library. While reading chapter 1, my initial reaction to the contents was rather negative. Chapter 1 is a bit convoluted, not so easy to understand, and even has a couple of errors in it. However, subsequent chapters are structured more logically and are understandable, though sometimes a discussion accompanying a piece of code can be a bit brief. As an introduction to the library, Chapter 3 shows a basic Echo client/server example which is quite good. There is a synchronous and asynchronous TCP implementation of the client and server, and also a synchronous UDP implementation of the client and server. Subsequent chapters implement more useful client/server applications. The book is not your one-stop destination for everything related to the Boost.Asio library, but it’s a great introduction to get you started with the library, to get to know the terminology used in the library, to learn about the difference between synchronous and asynchronous programming, to learn how to use multi-threading using the Boost threading library, and to get nice skeleton applications that you can reuse in your own projects. Several skeleton applications are provided such as synchronous and asynchronous versions, and single-threaded and multi-threaded versions. The C++ REST SDK (“Casablanca”)The C++ REST SDK (codename “Casablanca”) has officially been released as an open source project on CodePlex (http://casablanca.codeplex.com). It includes tools to quickly write modern, asynchronous C++ code that connects with REST services. It makes it much more easy to write application in C++ that use networking. Here is a simple example that uploads a file to an HTTP Server: #include <http_client.h>
#include <filestream.h>
#include <uri.h>
#include <thread>
#pragma comment(lib, "casablanca110")
using namespace concurrency::streams;
using namespace web::http::client;
using namespace web::http;
int main()
{
// Open stream to file.
file_stream<unsigned char>::open_istream(L"ReadMe.txt").then([](basic_istream<unsigned char> fileStream)
{
// Make HTTP request with the file stream as the body.
http_client client(U("http://www.myhttpserver.com"));
client.request(methods::PUT, L"myfile", fileStream).then([fileStream](http_response response)
{
fileStream.close();
// Perform actions here to inspect the HTTP response...
if (response.status_code() == status_codes::OK)
{
}
});
});
std::this_thread::sleep_for(std::chrono::seconds(10));
return 0;
}
The library also makes it easy to create and consume JSON formatted strings from C++. Next Belgian C++ Users Group Meeting (February 4, 2013)The next meeting of the Belgian C++ Users Group is planned for Monday February 4th 2013 at 18:30 at Materialise HQ. Note: The deadline for registrations is January 18! The agenda is as follows:
Materialise ( http://materialise.be/ ) is sponsoring this event by providing the location, drinks and catering  The event is free for everyone, but you need to register for it. Using C++ Standard Library File I/O in Windows Store appsBy default, the following simple piece of standard C++ code will not work in Windows Store apps. wofstream out(L"c:\\temp\\Data.txt"); out << L"Foo" << endl; The reason is that Windows Store apps run with low privileges, meaning that there are restrictions on which files and folders you are allowed to access. Luckily, there is a way to make the above code work. The only thing you have to do is to grant “ALL APPLICATION PACKAGES” read/write access to the folder you want. TechDays 2013
There will be two pre-conferences on March 5th:
Content on March 6th and 7th: focus is on developing Windows 8, Windows Azure and Windows Phone apps, of course supported by sessions on EF, tools, ASP.NET, identity and more. There will also be a corner with MEET members and MVPs who can help you with any questions or problems you might have. You get an early bird discount of 15% if you order tickets before January 1st 2013. More information on the official TechDays site. Game “Live Mosaic” Released
New NASHere is a picture of my new NAS setup, before assembly
Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 Now Available
We can now target Windows XP again with C++ code, and there have been a couple of C++ unit testing enhancements. For Windows Store applications, the update includes support for both mixed-mode managed/native debugging and for native ARM dump debugging. Get more details about the update. Team Foundation ServiceMicrosoft has removed the Beta label from their online Team Foundation Service. TFS is thoroughly integrated into Visual Studio. CyberLink PowerDVD 12
PowerDVD 12 supports Blu-ray 3D, 4K video playback, and HDMI 1.4, and has optimization support for 3rd gen Intel Core processors, and GPU’s from both AMD and NVIDIA. Media can be enhanced in the following ways:
CyberLink also has an App called “PowerDVD Remote” which allows you to control PowerDVD from your smartphone or tablet. It supports full navigation and playback for Blu-rays and DVD’s. It can also wirelessly play and save videos and photos from your smart device to your PC; turn you smart device into a wireless keyboard and mouse pad for your PC, and it supports multi-touch control to remotely rotate and zoom-in photos. Unfortunately, the App is currently only available on the Apple App Store and on the Android App Market. Since I have a Windows Phone, I was unable to test this functionality. I think the App is a great addition to PowerDVD, so I really hope they release a version for the Windows Phone. Windows App Day on November 23rd Microsoft is organizing a Windows App Day on November 23rd, officially described as follows:
Scoop: On the Windows App Day, Microsoft will be announcing a contest around Windows 8 where they’ll have devices as prizes for developing apps, so start thinking about possible Apps that you could develop for the contest. Details about the contest will be made public at a later date. When: Friday 23 November 2012, 9AM to 6PM Visual C++ November CTP, now with more C++11As promised, Microsoft is releasing out-of-band updates for Visual C++. A preview of the first such update has now been released as the November 2012 Compiler CTP. This is a Customer Technology Preview and does not come with a ‘Go Live’ license, but it allows you to start experimenting and testing new features, and to provide feedback. This November 2012 CTP contains a lot of new C++11 features:
More details, including installation instructions and how to give feedback can be found here. Download the November 2012 CTP and start playing with these new C++11 features. |
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A while ago I assembled myself a new PC in which I included a Blu-ray burner, so obviously I wanted to use the PC to play Blu-ray movies. The first thing I did was trying to find a freeware player that could play Blu-ray movies. I tried a couple, including VLC, but all of them had problems playing around 50% of my Blu-rays because they didn’t support the format on those discs. Next, I decided to look at commercial solutions and tried CyberLink PowerDVD 12. Installation on my Windows 8 Pro went without any problem. I tried all my Blu-rays and PowerDVD 12 happily played all of them without any issues. Image and sound quality for all Blu-ray discs I tested was great out-of-the-box. I played around with the settings and found a TrueTheater Surround audio option. After enabling it, audio sounded even better.
