Marc Gregoire’s Blog

A couple of months ago, I gave a presentation about C++11/C++0x features supported in Visual C++ 2010 for software engineers at my company. You can now download the slides.

The Microsoft TechDays 2012 event will be held on 14, 15 and 16 february 2012.
It’s the 10th anniversary edition and will happen in a new location (Kinepolis Imagibraine – Braine l’Alleud).

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By now, virtually everyone on this planet heart about the Windows 8 Developer Preview that was launched a couple of days ago on the Microsoft BUILD conference.
Everyone can download this developer preview. This will give you the opportunity to play and experiment with the new Metro layout for Windows.

The developer preview also includes a preview of Microsoft Visual Studio 11 express edition, which makes it very easy to make Metro style applications in C++, C#, VB.Net, or JavaScript.

Any serious developer should download this preview and learn as much as possible about the new Windows platform.

Go to the BUILD website to download the preview and to download interesting video recordings of the sessions on the BUILD conference.

Just a small post to let you all know about the All In One Code Framework from Mircosoft. Description from Microsoft:

The Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework is a free, centralized code sample library driven by developers’ needs. The goal of the All-In-One Code Framework is to provide typical code samples for all Microsoft development technologies, and reduce developers’ efforts in solving typical programming tasks.

Our team listens to developers’ pains in the MSDN forums, social media and various developer communities. We write code samples based on developers’ frequently asked programming tasks, and allow developers to download them with a short code sample publishing cycle. Additionally, our team offers a free code sample request service. This service is a proactive way for our developer community to obtain code samples for certain programming tasks directly from Microsoft.

For more information on the Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, visit our YouTube channel or download at http://1code.codeplex.com/.

I got the confirmation email from Microsoft that my MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award for Visual C++ is extended for 2011

See my MVP profile.

Get your copy here.
You can also browse the above site to learn all the new features of IE9, especially its focus on speed and standard compliancy

Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1.
MSDN subscribers can download it right now.
It will be publicly available on 10th of March.
See Soma Segar’s blog for details on what is included/changed with SP1.

Microsoft has released the release candidate of Internet Explorer 9.
Get it here.

Stephan T. Lavavej (aka STL ) from Microsoft has created a series of Channel 9 video presentations discussing several aspects of the STL. They serve as a very good introduction to using the Standard Template Library.

• Part 1: sequence containers
• Part 2: associative containers
• Part 3: smart pointers
• Part 4: Nurikabe solver
• Part 5: Nurikabe solver, continued
• Part 6: algorithms and functors
• Part 7: algorithms and functors, continued
• Part 8: regular expressions
• Part 9: rvalue references
• Part 10: type traits

I found them very interesting

Windows Vista and later versions of Windows have a so called Kernel Transaction Manager (KTM). This makes it easy for application to use transactions. There are two big components built on top of the KTM: Transactional NTFS (TxF) and Transactional Registry (TxR). With TxF you can combine several file system operations into a transaction and either commit or rollback the transaction as a whole. TxR allows you to do the same thing with registry manipulations. File system transactions and registry transactions can be grouped into a single transaction. That way we can ensure that all file system modifications and all registry modifications are fully executed or none at all.

I wrote an article that gives a very brief overview of TxF and TxR to give you an idea of what you can accomplish with it. Creating your own transaction manager other than TxF or TxR is also possible but requires you to create a Win32 transaction aware service (= resource manager) which is outside the scope of this introductory article. You can read the full article on codeguru.com.

On the VC++ MVP mailing list an interesting discussion took place on using exceptions in C++. Now, Diego Dagum, the VC++ Community PM, has written an interesting blog post summarizing that discussion. It’s definitely an interesting read if you work with C++.
Read it here.

Introduction

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 includes a number of enhancements and new features for MFC developers. One of those changes is an animation API to make it easy for you to create animations in MFC applications. This article will briefly introduce this animation API.
This articles was also posted on Codeguru.com.
Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta. It’s available right now for MSDN subscribers and will be available to everyone on Thursday.

It includes a new help viewer that I mentioned in my previous blog entry and “Win7-specific MFC APIs to support use of Direct2D, DirectWrite, and Windows Animation Technologies”. I can’t wait to try those out

Get more details here.

Microsoft is planning to include a new help viewer with Visual Studio 2010 SP1, which is long overdue

You can see a presentation here.

Here is a list of free eBooks related to Microsoft technologies.

• Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 (10 chapters by Patrice Pelland, Pascal Paré, and Ken Haines)
• Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 (10 chapters by Ross Mistry and Stacia Misner)
• Petzold’s Programming Windows Phone 7 (1000 pages by Charles Petzold)
• Own Your Future: Update Your Skills with Resources and Career Ideas from Microsoft (8 chapters by Katherine Murray)
• Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions (Second Edition) (6 chapters by Mitch Tulloch)
• First Look Microsoft Office 2010 (14 chapters by Katherine Murray)
• Windows 7 troubleshooting tips (short eBook by Mitch Tulloch)
• Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2 (9 chapters by Charlie Russel and Craig Zacker)
• Deploying Windows 7, Essential Guidance (10 chapters from the Windows 7 Resource Kit and 6 TechNet articles)

Enjoy

Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 to MSDN subscribers which extends testing, code visualization and modeling capabilities in VS2010. Its main features are more advanced platform and tool support for both manual and automated testing scenarios. It allows you to better control your Silverlight 4 testing scenarios and UI testing code.

Feature Pack 2 includes the following C++ related additions:

• Generate Dependency Graphs for C and C++ Code
• Validate C and C++ Code Against Layer Diagrams

Feature Pack 2 is cumulative and includes Feature Pack 1.

Get more information here.

I just stumbled upon an article mentioning that Evernote abandoned WPF and the Microsoft .NET framework and rewrote their application from scratch in native C++ code The official reason given:

The blurry fonts, slow startup times, large memory footprint, and poor support for certain graphics cards were all issues that the technology behind 3.5 was incapable of resolving. As a result, we ended up chasing down platform bugs rather than adding the great features our users wanted.

Read the article here.

Marius Bancila posted an excellent post on his blog explaining how to define x64 target for you Visual C++ Projects.

If you want to port an existing 32-bit application for the x64 platform (especially since 32-bit processors will soon be history), or if you want to target x64 for a new application, the first step in building for x64 is setting up your solution. In this post I will explain what are the steps in configuring x64 as target platform for your projects. Of course you must have the 64-bit compiler and tools installed to make this possible.

Read the full article.

In October, Microsoft will be making a change to the licensing of its Microsoft Security Essentials product. After the change, small businesses can install the Security Essentials on up to 10 PCs for FREE. Previously, it was only free for consumer use. Microsoft Security Essentials provides protection from viruses, spyware and other malicious threats.

Get more information on MSDN.

Visit the Microsoft Security Essentials website.

Microsoft has released the final version of the Windows Phone 7 developers tools
The package includes everything you need to start writing applications and games for Windows Phone 7. The package is completely free and includes all of the following:

• Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone – Free edition of VS 2010 for Phone development.
• Express Blend 4 for Windows Phone – Free version of Blend for Windows Phone 7 Development.
• Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 – Rich framework for building great applications for Windows Phone 7.
• XNA Game Studio for Windows Phone 7 – Rich framework that enables you to build great 2D and 3D games for Windows Phone 7.
• Windows Phone Emulator – A hardware accelerated emulator that allows you to run and debug your applications and games without requiring a phone.
• Phone Registration Tool – When you get a device, this allows you to “unlock” the device so you can run/debug your application on it, using your Marketplace account.

Download the tools here.
Read Scott Guthrie’s blog post to get much more details on the release.