Below is an example of a range-based for loop looping over a standard C-style array, incrementing each value by 1.

int myArray[3] = {1, 2, 3};
for(auto& el : myArray) {
    ++el;
}

Note that this example also uses the auto type deduction introduced in C++0x.
Now it’s only waiting until the C++ compilers start supporting it

• Office 2010
• SharePoint Server 2010
• Visio 2010
• Project 2010

“Microsoft’s Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 beta programs were the largest ever, with three times the number of participants compared with the Office 2007 beta program. As a result, 8.6 million people are already using Office 2010 and related products. In addition, more than 1,000 partners are already building solutions for the 2010 set of products.”

Right now it’s available in 14 languages. In the next few months it will become available in 94 languages.

Read the full press release.

The CTP includes the following components:

• Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone CTP
• Windows Phone Emulator CTP
• Silverlight for Windows Phone CTP
• XNA Game Studio 4.0 CTP

Get it here.

I would particularly like to thank my technical editor, Marc Gregoire, for doing such an outstanding job of reviewing the text and checking out all the code fragments and examples in the book. His many constructive comments and suggestions for better ways of presenting the material has undoubtedly made the book a much better tutorial.

Below is a description of what you can expect from the book.

By following author Ivor Horton’s accessible tutorial approach and detailed examples you can quickly become an effective C++ programmer. Thoroughly updated for the 2010 release, this book introduces you to the latest development environment and teached you how to build real-world applications using Visual C++. With this book by your side, you are well on your way to writing applications in both versions of C++ and becoming a successful C++ programmer.

Ivor Horton’s Beginning Visual C++ 2010:

• Teaches the essentials of C++ programming using both of the C++ language technologies supported by Visual C++ 2010.
• Shares techniques for finding errors in C++ programs and explains general debugging principles.
• Discusses the structure and essential elements that are present in every Windows application.
• Demonstrates how to develop native Windows applications using the Microsoft Foundation Classes.
• Guides you through designing and creating substantial Windows applications in both C++ and C++/CLI.
• Features numerous working examples and exercises that help build programming skills.

“If you install the retail (RTM) release of Visual Studio 2010 on the same machine on which you already have the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP, you will be unable to build your Windows Phone projects.  Further, while the Windows Phone project type will continue to appear in the File/New dialog, you will not be able to build Windows Phone 7 applications.”

The Windows Phone Developer Tools are being updated and a version that supports the final version of Visual Studio 2010 will be released in a few weeks.

In the meantime, Charlie Kindel recommends the following if you need the retail version of Visual Studio 2010 together with the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP:

• Install Visual Studio 2010 to a VPC image
• Install Visual Studio 2010  on another machine

Note that installing the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP to a VPC image is not supported.

Register here to be informed when an updated version of the Windows Phone Developer Tools is released.

Today, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4. A lot of new features are included. One of them is a completely new editor.

“Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 have something for every developer. The new editor, now using Windows Presentation Foundation, delivers a more flexible, feature-rich environment that supports concepts such as the use of multiple monitors. This enables a developer to have one monitor with code, another with the user interface designer, and yet another with database structure.”

Visual C++ 2010 also includes a lot of new features, some of them are:

• MSBuild and multi-targeting
• IntelliSense and Browsing (#include auto completion, call hierarchy, red squiggles, find all references, class wizard)
• C++ compiler changes (static_assert, auto keyword, lambda, decltype, rvalue references)
• Ribbon designer
• Deployment changes
• Task dialog support
• Restart manager support

Read the full press release here or watch the keynote.

Later this week, Silverlight 4 will also be released to the web (RTW). At that time, an update for Visual Studio 2010 will also become available that will allow you to develop applications using Silverlight 4.

He touches the following features:

• MSBuild and multi-targeting
• IntelliSense and Browsing (#include auto completion, call hierarchy, red squiggles, find all references, class wizard)
• C++ compiler changes (static_assert, auto keyword, lambda, decltype, rvalue references)
• Ribbon designer
• Deployment changes
• Task dialog support
• Restart manager support

You can read his posts here. They give you a good idea of new features in VC++ 2010

<a href="app://some.target">Test</a>

When you would put this link in a normal Internet Explorer window, clicking the link will generate an error because IE does not know how to handle the APP protocol. The name APP is chosen arbitrarily. You can use whatever you want. Handling these custom protocols in your C++ application is actually pretty simple and it doesn’t even involve any real COM coding like in the previous articles. The first thing you need to do is to add a handler for the BeforeNavigate2 handler. Open the resource editor and open your dialog with the WebBrowser control. Right click the WebBrowser control and select “Add Event Handler…”. Select “BeforeNavigate2” as message type, select the appropriate class and click “Add and Edit”. This handler will be called right before the WebBrowser control will navigate to a new page. To handle the custom protocol, implement the handler as follows:

void CMyDlg::BeforeNavigate2Explorer(LPDISPATCH pDisp, VARIANT* URL, VARIANT* Flags,
    VARIANT* TargetFrameName, VARIANT* PostData, VARIANT* Headers, BOOL* Cancel)
{
    const wchar_t* cpszProtocolName = L"app";
    const wchar_t* cpszProtocolSeparator = L"://";

    // We only handle VT_BSTR.
    if (URL->vt != VT_BSTR)
        return;

    // Check the protocol of the URL
    CString str = URL->bstrVal;
    int iPos = str.Find(cpszProtocolSeparator);
    if (iPos == -1)    // Unable to figure out protocol
        return;

    // Extract protocol and check if it's our APP protocol
    CString strProtocol = str.Mid(0, iPos);
    if (strProtocol.CompareNoCase(cpszProtocolName))
        return;    // not our APP protocol

    // It's our APP protocol, so start processing it.
    // Start by preventing Internet Explorer from handling the protocol.
    *Cancel = TRUE;

    // Extract target URL
    CString strTarget = str.Mid(iPos+wcslen(cpszProtocolSeparator));
    strTarget.TrimRight(L"/");

    // Now we are ready to process our protocol.
    // For this demo, I just render a new HTML page with the name
    // of the URL target without the protocol part of the string.
    CString strHTML;
    strHTML.Format(L"My APP protocol processing: \"%s\"", strTarget);
    WriteHTML(strHTML);
}

The flow is pretty straightforward. The URL protocol is extracted; if it’s not our protocol, we let Internet Explorer handle the URL for us. If it is our custom “APP” protocol, we first set Cancel to TRUE which will prevent Internet Explorer from handling this URL protocol. Once that is done, we are completely free to implement the handling of the “APP” protocol however we want. As demonstration I just write a new HTML document from memory which will just mention that we are processing an “APP” protocol URL and that will also display the target part of the URL.

You can quickly test the code with the following piece of HTML rendered from memory:

WriteHTML(L"<html><body>"
    L"<p><a href=\"app://FirstAppProtocolTestLink\">test 1</a></p>"
    L"<p><a href=\"APP://SecondAppProtocolTestLink.Withdots\">test 2</a></p>"
    L"</body></html>");

Run the application, click on the “test 1″ or “test 2″ link and see what happens.

That’s it for handling custom URL protocols in C++

<a href="#n25">Jump to anchor n25</a>
<a name="n25">25</a>

It took me a while to find a workaround, so that’s why I’m posting it now for other people to use. Basically, we cannot use the standard navigation techniques. I tried several possible workaround and the only one that I got working properly is by manually scrolling the window until the requested anchor is visible. It sounds complicated, but it really works pretty nicely. I wrote this little wrapper function to do all the hard work.

void CMyDlg::ScrollToAnchor(const wchar_t* anchor)
{
    IDispatch* pHtmlDoc = m_explorer.get_Document();
    if (!pHtmlDoc)
        return;
    CComPtr<IHTMLDocument2> doc2;
    doc2.Attach((IHTMLDocument2*)pHtmlDoc);
    if (doc2)
    {
        CComPtr<IHTMLElementCollection> anchors;
        HRESULT hr = doc2->get_anchors(&anchors);
        if (SUCCEEDED(hr) && anchors)
        {
            _variant_t index = 0;
            _variant_t str = anchor;
            IDispatch *pdisp;
            hr = anchors->item(str, index, &pdisp);
            if (SUCCEEDED(hr) && pdisp)
            {
                CComPtr<IHTMLElement> el;
                hr = pdisp->QueryInterface(IID_IHTMLElement, (void**)&el);
                if (SUCCEEDED(hr) && el)
                {
                    long yTotal = 0;
                    while (1)
                    {
                        long y;
                        el->get_offsetTop(&y);
                        yTotal += y;
                        CComPtr<IHTMLElement> el2;
                        hr = el->get_offsetParent(&el2);
                        if (SUCCEEDED(hr) && el2)
                            el = el2;
                        else
                            break;
                    }
                    CComPtr<IHTMLWindow2> wnd;
                    hr = doc2->get_parentWindow(&wnd);
                    if (SUCCEEDED(hr) && wnd)
                        wnd->scrollTo(0, yTotal);
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

What it does is it gets a pointer to the document. Then gets a list of all the anchors in the document and get the anchor with the given name out of that list. Once we have the target element, we calculate the offset from the top of the document. This is done in a while loop, because the target anchor could be inside another element like a div or a table. After calculating the offset, we get a pointer to the HTML window and call the scrollTo function to make it scroll to the anchor position.

Now the only thing you need to do is to render your HTML using the method in my previous blog entry and then call this new ScrollToAnchor function with the name of the anchor to which you want to scroll.

“Tis the season for Series finales. We’ve got one too - dropping the ‘Series’ and keeping the ‘Windows Phone 7.’ Done.”

Excellent, “Windows Phone 7″ sounds much better without the strange “Series” behind it

See my MVP profile.

The WP7S developer platform contains 2 frameworks:

• Silverlight: to make rich interactive applications
• XNA: to make complex 2D/3D games

Code is written in C#.

Everyone can start writing applications for the new phone platform. You only need to download 1 free package. This packages contains:

• Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone CTP
• Windows Phone Emulator CTP
• Silverlight for Windows Phone CTP
• XNA 4.0 Game Studio CTP

Download the package to get started. Only Windows Vista and Windows 7 are officially supported to run the tools. Note that the tools are currently in CTP state so they are not yet final. If you want to use Expression Blend you have to download it separately.

More information can be found on the Windows Phone 7 Series Developer Site, where you can also find developer guides, more detailed information, Windows Marketplace submission guidelines, forums, a few code samples etc…

The first thing you have to do is to add the WebBrowser control to your dialog. So, in Visual Studio, open the resource editor and then open the dialog onto which you want to put the WebBrowser control. Once the dialog is opened in the resource editor, right click on an empty space on the dialog and select “Insert ActiveX Control…”. This will open a new window in which you can select “Microsoft Web Browser” and then click OK. Visual Studio will automatically create a wrapper class for this ActiveX control which will probably be called explorer.h and explorer.cpp while the wrapper class will most likely be called CExplorer.

Now, right click the WebBrowser control on your dialog and select “Add Variable”. Make a variable with category set to “Control” and with the variable type set to the wrapper class “CExplorer” and hit OK.

Now we can start writing code. The first thing required is to load up some basic document; I use about:blank. Do this in your OnInitDialog handler as follows.

COleVariant loc(L"about:blank");
m_explorer.Navigate2(loc, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL); 

The above is very important. If you don’t load an initial document, the WebBrowser control will not render any HTML that you try to push to it. This also means that before you can start writing HTML from memory in the WebBrowser control, you have to wait until the initial document has been fully loaded. This can be done with the “DocumentComplete” event. In the dialog editor, right the WebBrowser control and click on “Add Event Handler…”. Select “DocumentComplete” as message type, select the appropriate class and click “Add and Edit”. You can use that handler to change a boolean variable in your code to mark whether the document has been fully loaded. When it is fully loaded you can start writing HTML from memory to it.

Once that is finished, you can add the following helper function:

#include <MsHTML.h>
void CMyDlg::WriteHTML(const wchar_t* html)
{
	IDispatch* pHtmlDoc = m_explorer.get_Document();
	if (!pHtmlDoc)
		return;
	CComPtr<IHTMLDocument2> doc2;
	doc2.Attach((IHTMLDocument2*)pHtmlDoc);
	if (!doc2)
		return;
	 // Creates a new one-dimensional array
	SAFEARRAY* psaStrings = SafeArrayCreateVector(VT_VARIANT, 0, 1);
	if (!psaStrings)
		return;
	BSTR bstr = SysAllocString(html);
	if (bstr)
	{
		VARIANT* param;
		HRESULT hr = SafeArrayAccessData(psaStrings, (LPVOID*)&param);
		if (SUCCEEDED(hr))
		{
			param->vt = VT_BSTR;
			param->bstrVal = bstr;
			hr = SafeArrayUnaccessData(psaStrings);
			if (SUCCEEDED(hr))
			{
				doc2->write(psaStrings);
				doc2->close();
			}
		}
	}
	// SafeArrayDestroy calls SysFreeString for each BSTR!
	if (psaStrings)
		SafeArrayDestroy(psaStrings);
}

With the above function, it’s very easy to dynamically create and display HTML from memory. For example:

WriteHTML(L"<html><body><h1>My Header</h1><p>Some text below the header</p></body></html>");

Note that the above code is expecting a Unicode build. If you don’t use Unicode, you need to change the wchar_t types and you need to change the way how you allocate the BSTR variable.

That’s it. Pretty easy if you know how to do it, but it took me some time to figure it out.

[ Update: Fixed some typos and added mshtml.h reference. ]

[ Update 2: Added a call to "doc2->close();" after "doc2->write()" and added code to check the result of the doc2.Attach() call. ]

Windows 2000 Professional and Windows 2000 Server are approaching 10 years since their launch and both products will go out of support on July 13, 2010.

Windows XP was launched back in 2001. While support for the product will continue, Service Pack 2 will go out of support on July 13, 2010. From that date onwards, Microsoft will no longer support or provide free security updates for Windows XP SP2.  Please install the free Service Pack 3 for Windows XP to have the most secure and supported Windows XP platform.

Finally, Windows Vista with no Service Packs installed will end support on April 13 2010.  Please install the free Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista to have the most secure and supported Windows Vista platform.

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

// Increment value by 1 using RValue reference parameter.
int increment(int&& value)
{
   cout << "value = " << value << endl;
   value++;
   return value;
}

int main()
{
   int a = 10;
   int b = 20;

   // Increment a
   int result = increment(a);
   cout << "  a=" << a << ", b=" << b << ", result=" << result << endl;
   // Increment b
   result = increment(b);
   cout << "  a=" << a << ", b=" << b << ", result=" << result << endl;
   // Increment an expression
   result = increment(a + b);
   cout << "  a=" << a << ", b=" << b << ", result=" << result << endl;
   // Increment a literal
   result = increment(3);
   cout << "  a=" << a << ", b=" << b << ", result=" << result << endl;

   return 0;
} 

However, when trying to compile this using the latest release candidate of Visual Studio 2010, you will get the following errors:

rvalue_test.cpp(18): error C2664: 'increment' : cannot convert parameter 1 from 'int' to 'int &&'
          You cannot bind an lvalue to an rvalue reference
rvalue_test.cpp(21): error C2664: 'increment' : cannot convert parameter 1 from 'int' to 'int &&'
          You cannot bind an lvalue to an rvalue reference

These are related to the lines that are trying to increment a and b. Incrementing an expression or a literal still works as before. To get rid of those errors, you need to convert the lvalue to an rvalue. You can use the std::move function for this as shown in red below.

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

// Increment value by 1 using RValue reference parameter.
int increment(int&& value)
{
   cout << "value = " << value << endl;
   value++;
   return value;
}

int main()
{
   int a = 10;
   int b = 20;

   // Increment a
   int result = increment(std::move(a));
   cout << "  a=" << a << ", b=" << b << ", result=" << result << endl;
   // Increment b
   result = increment(std::move(b));
   cout << "  a=" << a << ", b=" << b << ", result=" << result << endl;
   // Increment an expression
   result = increment(a + b);
   cout << "  a=" << a << ", b=" << b << ", result=" << result << endl;
   // Increment a literal
   result = increment(3);
   cout << "  a=" << a << ", b=" << b << ", result=" << result << endl;

   return 0;
}

This now compiles without any errors and produces the following output:

value = 10
  a=11, b=20, result=11
value = 20
  a=11, b=21, result=21
value = 32
  a=11, b=21, result=33
value = 3
  a=11, b=21, result=4

Now, it again works as expected

Client editions in the Visual Studio 2010 product line include:

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Premium with MSDN
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional with MSDN
• Microsoft Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 with MSDN

(Visual Studio 2010 products can be purchased without an MSDN subscription in certain channels.)

Server products in the Visual Studio 2010 product line include:

• Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010
• Microsoft Visual Studio Lab Management 2010

Volume licensing customers who need a definitive guide to licensing terms and conditions should reference the Microsoft Licensing Product Use Rights (PUR) and applicable licensing agreements. For retail customers, the license terms are specified in the End User Licensing Agreement (EULA) included with the product.

See Scott Guthrie blog post about it.

Right now it’s available for MSDN subscribers.
On Wednesday 10th of February everyone will be able to get their hands on it

Two important things to know (from Scott Guthrie blog post):

• If you have previously installed VS 2010 Beta 2 on your computer you should use Add/Remove Programs (within Windows Control Panel) to remove VS 2010 Beta2 and .NET 4 Beta2 before installing the VS 2010 RC.  Note that VS 2010 RC can be installed on the same machine side-by-side with VS 2008 and VS 2005.
• Silverlight 3 projects are supported with today’s VS 2010 RC build – however Silverlight 4 projects are not yet supported.  We will be adding VS 2010 RC support for SL4 with the next public Silverlight 4 drop. If you are doing active Silverlight 4 development today we recommend staying with the VS10 Beta 2 build for now.

The following programs are available in this beta version:

• Word
• PowerPoint
• Outlook
• Excel
• OneNote
• Access
• Publisher
• InfoPath
• SharePoint Workspace
• Communicator

Separately available beta programs are:

• Microsoft Visio 2010
• Microsoft Project 2010

Get all the details.

I have uploaded some pictures of the trip. See them here. Enjoy

Happy New Year
Sretna Nova Godina
Gelukkig Nieuwjaar