Marc Gregoire’s Blog

CppCon 2016 was again a great success. I’m looking forward to next year’s edition.
In the meantime, all sessions are now available on the CppCon YouTube video channel.
Enjoy all the material 🙂

The next meeting of the Belgian C++ Users Group is planned for Thursday November 24th, 2016 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:

• 18:00: Sandwiches.
• 18:30: Session 1: What’s new in C++17? (Peter Van Weert)
  This talk will give an overview of all the new features scheduled to be included in C++17.
• 19:30: Break
• 19:45: Session 2: Mobile App Development for Multiple Platforms with Visual C++, 2016 (Marc Gregoire)
  Visual C++ supports mobile app development for Windows, Android, and iOS from a single code base, optionally with a thin platform-specific UI layer. The resulting binaries can be deployed to an emulator or to a real device and debugged on both, all from within Visual C++. This presentation is a follow up of my previous BeCPP presentation, and as such the session will only briefly cover the basics of cross-platform mobile app development. Please view https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y47g8xNE1o or https://channel9.msdn.com/events/CPP/CppCon-2015/CPPConD02V019 for this material in depth. In this follow up, we go over the new features added for cross-platform development since last year. Additionally, we continue where last year’s session ended, and will go deeper on how to write your applications to have a native look-and-feel UI on each of the different platforms.
• 20:45: Short presentation and guided tour of Nikon Metrology followed by a drink.

The event is free for everyone, but you need to register for it.

There are 50 seats available for this event.

We will be giving away a copy of C++ Standard Library Quick Reference.

Note: The deadline for registrations is November 20th, 2016!

NOTE: Due to a logistics problem, the date has changed. The event will now take place on Thursday June 30th and not on June 23rd!

The next meeting of the Belgian C++ Users Group is planned for Thursday June 30th, 2016 at 18:00 at Newtec.

Newtec ( http://www.newtec.eu/ ) is sponsoring this event by providing the location, drinks and catering.

The agenda is as follows:

• 18:00: Sandwiches.
• 18:30: Session 1: Build a database-independent cross-platform persistence layer with Qt (Johan Decorte) Most applications need some kind of persistence. Often relatonal databases are a good choice to store and retrieve data. Besides a cross-platform IDE Qt also provides extensive general-purpose libraries including a database-independent, object-oriented and clean SQL Module API. You can decide even at runtime wether your target database is e.g. Oracle, MS SQL Server or mySQL. Both plain SQL and stored procedure calls are supported.
• 19:30: Break
• 19:45: Session 2: Objects? No Thanks! (Wouter van Ooijen) Micro-controller programming can benefit from compile-time polymorphism without paying a run-time price by using static class templates. For small micro-controllers (kilobytes of memory) C++ run-time polymorphism (using objects and virtual methods) is often deemed too expensive in ROM, RAM, and run-time overhead. This talk shows how templates can be used to implement compile-time polymorphism, and static classes to avoid the need for run-time objects. This technique can produce highly modular and composable code that is still as efficient as dedicated C code, but offers better prospects for re-use. This approach is illustrated with an abstraction for GPIO (General Purpose Input Output) pins and ports, with an implementation on an LPC1114 microcontroller, and a number of decorators for pins and numbers.
• 20:45: Short presentation and guided tour by Newtec.
• 21:00: Drink

The event is free for everyone, but you need to register for it.

There are 50 seats available for this event.

We will be giving away a copy of Professional C++, 3rd Edition.

Note: The deadline for registrations is June 27th, 2016!

 

On Tuesday 15th of March I gave a presentation for the GDG Brussels (Google Developer Group) in Belgium titled “Cross-Platform Mobile App Development with Visual C++ 2015”. Below you can download the slides.

 

The Windows 10 Developer Day brought together more than 300 developers across 3 locations in Belgium (Brussels, Hasselt and Gent). The sessions in Hasselt were recorded and are now available online.

Dive into the benefits that come with the Universal Windows Platform and learn how to have your app run on any device regardless of screen size.

Be amazed about the ease of making the web work for you on Windows 10. Get to know the advantages of building a cloud-connected, mobile experience and see for yourself what the future computing looks like!

Watch the videos on Channel 9.

The next meeting of the Belgian C++ Users Group is planned for Thursday December 3th, 2015 at 18:00 at Selligent.

Selligent ( https://www.selligent.com/ ) is sponsoring this event by providing the location, drinks and catering.

The agenda is as follows:

• 18:00: Sandwiches.
• 18:30: Session 1: Move semantics && rvalue references, part 2 (Bert Rodiers) In this presentation we will continue where we left off a year ago. First we will discuss some alternative implementations for the move operators and briefly talk about how to pass arguments. The rest of the talk dives into rvalue references in combination with deduced types and perfect forwarding.
• 19:30: Break
• 19:45: Session 2: Cross-Platform Mobile App Development with Visual C++ 2015 (Marc Gregoire) Visual C++ 2015 supports the development of apps for the Windows platform as well as for Android and iOS. A single code base, possibly with a thin platform-specific UI layer, can be compiled to run on Windows, Android, and iOS. The resulting binary can be published to a device and debugged, all from within Visual C++ 2015. This presentation introduces you to such cross-platform mobile app development, including debugging and emulation, and includes a number of demos.
• 20:45: Short presentation by Selligent.
• 21:00: Drink

The event is free for everyone, but you need to register for it.

There are 50 seats available for this event.

We will be giving away 2 copies of Professional C++, 3rd Edition.

Note: The deadline for registrations is November 27th, 2015!

The next meeting of the Belgian C++ Users Group is planned for Thursday June 18th, 2015 at 18:00 at OM Partners.

OM Partners ( https://ompartners.com/ ) is sponsoring this event by providing the location, drinks and catering.

The agenda is as follows:

• 18:00: Sandwiches.
• 18:30: Session 1: The C++ Memory Model and Atomics. (Peter Van Weert) Learn more about the C++ memory model introduced by C++11. Get answers to questions such as what exactly is this C++ memory model? What does it provide and guarantee? What are atomics? How do atomics relate to the memory model? How to use atomics to write thread-safe code? And more.
• 19:30: Break
• 19:45: Session 2: Portable C++ File System abstraction (Lieven de Cock) Via the standard library we can open and close files, we can read and write to them, be it old style FILE* or fstream. So content manipulation is available in a portable way. But how about File (and Directory) Management. On Posix you might have done stat, opendir, readdir, closedir, …. Others might be acquainted with Windows Api methods like FindFirstFile, CreateFile,  CopyFile, … But nothing portable. There are however several libraries who can bring a lot of such functionality for File and Directory Management. We will look at 2 such libraries, boost::FileSystem and Poco::FileSystem. Finishing up with a sneak peak on the upcoming C++ library standard proposal for File System. So it is time to code in a portable way now, and the future will even be more bright. Get yourself a new HD or SSD because we are managing the files from within the C++ code in a portable way.
• 20:45: Short presentation by OM Partners.
• 21:00: Drink

The event is free for everyone, but you need to register for it.

There are 80 seats available for this event.

CppDepend is also sponsoring this event by providing a number of free licenses for their CppDepend product. When you register for the BeCPP event, there will be a checkbox that you can check if you are interested in such a license. By checking that checkbox you allow us to provide CppDepend with your email address so that they can create your license. We have 23 licenses available on a first-come-first-served basis. These are 20 personal licenses and 3 commercial licenses. From all interested people, 3 will be selected at random to receive a commercial license.

We will also be giving away 2 copies of Professional C++, 3rd Edition.

Note: The deadline for registrations is June 14th, 2015!

The next meeting of the Belgian C++ Users Group is planned for Wednesday December 17th, 2014 at 18:00 at TOMRA.

TOMRA ( http://www.tomra.com/ ) is sponsoring this event by providing the location, drinks and catering

The agenda is as follows:

• 18:00: Sandwiches.
• 18:30: Session 1: What’s new in VC++2015? (Marc Gregoire) An overview of new features and functionality in Microsoft Visual C++ 2015.
• 19:30: Break
• 19:45: Session 2: Move semantics && rvalue references, part 1 (Bert Rodiers) In this presentation we will be going deeper into move semantics and rvalue references. A large part of the presentation will talk about how to enable move support, discuss under which conditions it is applied and will point-out some potential pitfalls. We will also discuss Lambda generalized capture, which can be used to capture variables in a lambda expression using move semantics.
• 20:45: Presentation and/or guided tour of the TOMRA facilities for interested people followed by a drink.

The event is free for everyone, but you need to register for it.

There are 50 seats available for this event.

Note: The deadline for registrations is December 15th, 2014!

After the great success of CppCon 2014, CppCon 2015 has already been announced.
It will be held September 20-25 2015 in Bellevue, Washington, USA.
I highly recommend attending this conference if you are a C++ developer, so mark your calendars 🙂

CppCon 2014 was a great success. There were over 100 sessions spanning 5 fully packed days.
All sessions were professionally recorded and will be available online in a month or so.
However, the slides and other material such as source code is already becoming available for download. Not everything is there yet. In the coming days, more material will become available as soon as the organizers receive the documents from the different speakers.
Download them here.

Two pictures of me at CppCon 2014.

On Monday September 8th, 2014 I gave a presentation titled “Introduction to Microsoft C++ AMP” at CppCon 2014.
The slides of my presentation can be downloaded below:

This was the first edition of CppCon and it was a great success.
Looking forward to next year’s edition 🙂

CppCon is the annual, week-long face-to-face gathering for the entire C++ community. The conference is organized by the C++ community for the community. Taking place this year in the beautiful Seattle neighborhood and including multiple diverse tracks, the conference will appeal to anyone from C++ novices to experts.

What you can expect at CppCon:

• Invited talks and panels: the CppCon keynote by Bjarne Stroustrup will start off a week full of insight from some of the world’s leading experts in C++. Still have questions? Ask them at one of CppCon’s panels featuring those at the cutting edge of the language.
• Presentations by the C++ community: What do embedded systems, game development, high frequency trading, and particle accelerators have in common? C++, of course! Expect talks from a broad range of domains focused on practical C++ techniques, libraries, and tools.
• Lightning talks: Get informed at a fast pace during special sessions of short, less formal talks. Never presented at a conference before? This is your chance to share your thoughts on a C++-related topic in an informal setting.
• Evening events and “unconference” time: Relax, socialize, or start an impromptu coding session.

I’ll be giving a presentation myself at CppCon 2014: Introduction to C++ AMP (GPGPU Computing).

If you use C++, you should seriously consider coming to the conference.

The next meeting of the Belgian C++ Users Group is planned for Thursday May 8th, 2014 at 18:00 at Materialise HQ.

Materialise ( http://materialise.be/ ) is sponsoring this event by providing the location, drinks and catering

We will have an international speaker for this event: Artur Laksberg.

• Artur Laksberg leads the Visual C++ Libraries development team at Microsoft, responsible for the STL, CRT, C++ AMP, PPL, Casablanca and other libraries. His interests include concurrency, programming language and library design, and modern C++. Artur is one of the co-authors of the ISO C++ proposal on Parallelism (aka Parallel STL) as well as the Concurrency Technical Specification.

If you ever wanted to ask a question to a member of the Visual C++ product team, now is your chance.

The agenda is as follows:

• 18:00: Sandwiches.
• 18:30: Session 1: Parallelism in the Standard C++: What to Expect in C++ 17 (Artur Laksberg)
  It is 2014 and parallel programming has entered the mainstream. No longer is it the domain of the few highly trained experts. The tools available in the C++ today make parallelism accessible – if not yet easy – to average developers. However, writing efficient cross-platform parallel code in C++ is still hard. The standard constructs available in C++ 11/14 are too basic and too low-level. More advanced tools exist, but most are either vendor-specific or don’t work on all platforms. In this presentation, we’ll talk about the joint effort spearheaded by several members of the ISO C++ Committee to bring parallelism into the C++ Standard Template Library. The project known as the “Parallel STL” aims to bring muliticore and SIMD parallelism into the next revision of the ISO C++ Standard.
• 19:30: Break
• 19:45: Session 2: Asynchronous programming with futures and await (Artur Laksberg)
  We have to write asynchronous code for a number of reasons, such as making our GUI apps more responsive, or our server code more scalable. Dealing with asynchrony is hard, perhaps harder than parallelism, and doing it in C++ in a portable way is even harder. If you are familiar with the “callback soup”, “control flow inversion” and other such phenomena, you’ve experienced the pain of asynchrony. In this presentation, we’ll look at the state of the art of asynchrony in C++, discuss futures and continuations, await and resumable functions, and how these concepts are making their way to Standard C++.
• 20:45: Guided tour of the Materialise facilities for interested people followed by a drink.

The event is free for everyone, but you need to register for it.

There are 100 seats available for this event.

Read the official announcement.

Register for this free event.

The next meeting of the Belgian C++ Users Group is planned for Monday March 17th, 2014 at 18:00 at KLA-Tencor / ICOS Belgium.

KLA-Tencor / ICOS Belgium ( http://kla-tencor.com/ ) is sponsoring this event by providing the location, drinks and catering.

The agenda is as follows:

• 18:00: Sandwiches.
• 18:30: Session 1: What’s new in C++14 (Peter Van Weert)
  An overview of the new features in the latest C++14 standard.
• 19:30: Break
• 19:45: Session 2: What’s new in Visual C++ 2013 (Marc Gregoire)
  An overview of the new features in Visual C++ 2013 and the Visual C++ 2013 November CTP.
• 20:45: Short technically oriented presentation by the host KLA-Tencor / ICOS Belgium.
• 21:00: Drink.

Read the official announcement.

Register for this free event.

Looking forward to the Microsoft MVP Global Summit November 2013 🙂

The next meeting of the Belgian C++ Users Group is planned for Monday November 4th, 2013 at 18:00 at LMS International, a Siemens Business.

LMS International ( http://www.lmsintl.com/ ) is sponsoring this event by providing the location, drinks and catering.

This time, there will be one speaker, giving two presentations of one hour on one subject. The agenda is as follows:

• 18:00: Sandwiches.
• 18:30: Session 1: Strings and String Manipulation in C++, Part 1 (Lieven de Cock) Once there were c-arrays, evolution brought us std::string. This made life easier, and less manual reimplementation was needed because of the power std::string brought to the table. Nevertheless we still keep on reimplementing basic and advanced string manipulation functionality. By this continuously reinventing the wheel we spend a lot of time fixing the same mistakes, while out there are tried and tested and proven libraries. C++11 also brings more power, but we will focus on boost string manipulations. Basic manipulations, like replace, find, erase, split, join, trim, …, next to lexical_cast, boost tokenizer, regex (both boost and std) will be explained and show cased. Next to the lexical_cast we will mention std::to_string. Similar library functionality provided by the POCO libraries will be shown too. String power is at your fingers for free, just say the magic word.
• 19:30: Break
• 19:45: Session 2: Strings and String Manipulation in C++, Part 2 (Lieven de Cock)
• 20:45: Demo of an LMS International software product followed by a drink.

Read the official announcement.

Register for this free event.

The 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.

There will be two international speakers:

• Joel Falcou is an assistant professor at the University Paris-Sud and researcher at the Laboratoire de Recherche d’Informatique in Orsay, France. His work focuses on investigating high-level programming models for parallel architectures (present and future) and providing efficient implementation of such models using high-performance language features. He’s an active member of the Boost community and CEO of MetaScale, a French start-up valorizing his research. He is also a member of the ISO C++ Standards Committee.
• Jens Weller is a self-employed C++ specialist, working with C++ for over 14 years. He is organizing the C++ conference “Meeting C++” in Düsseldorf, and also runs http://meetingcpp.com. Jens has some vast C++ experience gathered as a freelancer in the IT Industry.

The agenda is as follows:

• 18:00: Sandwiches.
• 18:30: Session 1: Qt5 – Multimedia Overview (Jens Weller) The talk will give a short introduction into Qt5, and focus on its Multimedia Framework, showing how to write an MP3 Player or a video recorder in Qt5.
• 19:30: Break
• 19:45: Session 2: Boost.Proto (Joel Falcou) C++ Embedded Domain Specific Languages Made Easy.
• 20:45: Guided tour of Nikon Metrology followed by a drink.

Read the official announcement.

Register for this free event.

The 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:

• AZUG
• Belgian C++ user group
• BIWUG
• CLUG
• Pro-Exchange
• SCUG
• SQLUG
• ACCB.net/VBIB
• Visug
• WinSec
• WinTalks
• DotNetHub
• MADN
• TechNine

We hope to see you on June 20th!

After 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.