Marc Gregoire’s Blog

On 12 September 2012, there will be a launch event for Visual Studio 2012. You can follow this event from where ever you are. See here for details.

It was an honor to have Kate Gregory and Rong Lu speaking at our BeCPP meeting. A big thank you to both of you.

If you couldn’t attend the meeting in person, or if you would like to go over the slides again, you can download them from the BeCPP site.

Here are the slides of my presentation I gave on Community Day 2012.

Microsoft has made the Release Candidate of Visual Studio 2012 available for download. The release candidate comes with a Go-Live license.

Read Jason Zander blog post for details of this release.

Get it here.

The third meeting of the Belgian C++ Users Group is planned for Wednesday June 27th 2012 at 18:30 in the Microsoft offices in Zaventem.

There will be two presentations, and we are proud to announce that they will be given by 2 international top speakers:

• Kate Gregory is the author of over a dozen books, and speaks at DevTeach, TechEd (USA, Europe, Africa), and TechDays, C++ Connections (with fellow speakers Herb Sutter and Bjarne Stroustrup), among others. Her speaker ratings are consistently in the top 10%. Kate is a C++ MVP, a founding sponsor of the Toronto .NET Users Group, the founder of the East of Toronto .NET Users group, a member of the INETA speakers bureau, and a member of adjunct faculty at Trent University in Peterborough. Since January 2002 she has been Microsoft Regional Director for Toronto and since January 2004 she has been awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional designation for Visual C++. In June 2005 she won the Regional Director of the year award and in February 2011 she was designated Visual C++ MVP of the year for 2010. Kate develops courses on C++, Visual Studio, and Windows programming for Pluralsight and is writing a book on C++ AMP.
• Rong Lu is a Program Manager in the Visual C++ team at Microsoft. She holds both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science from Shanghai Jiaotong University. She is now working on Visual Studio vNext Application Lifecycle Management Tools for C++. Before that, she worked on the Visual Studio 2005 SDK, Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 releases, mainly responsible for designing architecture tools and SharePoint development tools. She has been a speaker at TechEd since 2007

Both are experienced speakers, and it’s a perfect opportunity for networking. If you ever wanted to ask a question to a member of the Visual C++ product team, now is your chance.

The agenda will be as follows:

• Session 1 (18:30 – 19:30): What’s new in VC++11 (Rong Lu)
• Break
• Session 2 (19:45 – 20:45): C++ AMP (GPGPU Computing) (Kate Gregory)
  It is time to start taking advantage of the computing power of GPUs. C++ AMP can deliver orders of magnitude performance increase with certain algorithms by utilizing the GPU to perform mathematical calculations.
• Drink

Microsoft is sponsoring this event by providing the location, drinks and sandwiches.

The event is free for everyone, but registration is required. Register now.
A limited number of seats are available.

( PS: If you know anyone interested in C++, please forward this invitation to them. )

Our devices are becoming increasingly connected, and at the same time our customers expect the applications running on those devices to be fast and fluid. Asynchrony is important on the client for responsiveness and on the server for scalability.

Today Microsoft is announcing Casablanca, an incubation effort to support cloud based client-server communication in native code using a modern asynchronous C++ API design. Casablanca is a project to start exploring how to best support C++ developers who want to take advantage of the radical shift in software architecture that cloud computing represents. If you are a developer writing a responsive client app, or a scalable server-side solution, where asynchrony goes hand in hand with parallelism, you should give Casablanca a try.

Here’s what you get with Casablanca:

• Support for accessing REST services from native code on Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8 Consumer Preview by providing asynchronous C++ bindings to HTTP, JSON, and URIs
• A Visual Studio extension SDK to help you write C++ HTTP client side code in your Windows 8 Metro style app
• Support for writing native-code REST for Azure, including Visual Studio integration
• Convenient libraries for accessing Azure blob and queue storage from native clients as a first class Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) feature
• A consistent and powerful model for composing asynchronous operations based on C++ 11 features
• A C++ implementation of the actor-based programming model inspired by Erlang.
• A set of samples and documentation

Here are a few links

• Soma’s announcement on his blog
• Casablanca on DevLabs
• Casablanca forums

There is now an official mechanism to become a member of the Belgian C++ Users Group.

Follow this link and register for the newsletter.
This will make you a member and from that point on you will receive announcements for future events of our users group.

I got the confirmation email from Microsoft that my MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award for Visual C++ is extended for 2012 🙂

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2012 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Visual C++ technical communities during the past year.

See my MVP profile.

Here are the slides of a template refresher presentation that I gave to software engineers at my company.

DeveloperFusion has posted an extract from my book “Professional C++, 2nd Edition”. The extract explains constructors in C++11.
You can read it here.
For more information about the book, source code, sample chapters, the book forum and other resources, go to the book’s homepage on wrox.com.

The Belgian C++ Users Group is planning its first meeting on Tuesday 3rd of April at 18:30 in the Microsoft offices in Zaventem (Leonardo Da vincilaan 3, 1930 Zaventem, Belgium)

The agenda will be as follows:

• Brief introduction to the Users Group
• Session 1: Writing modern C++ (Marc Gregoire)
• Break
• Session 2: Impact of C++11 move semantics on the performance of the STL (Francisco Almeida)

Microsoft is sponsoring this event by providing the location, drinks and sandwiches.

The event is free for everyone, but you need to register for it by sending an email to becpp@becpp.org.

Microsoft has announced that it will release Visual Studio 11 Beta on 29th of February, and that it will be “go live,” meaning you will be allowed to start using it in production environments. Read the official announcement.

The user interface of the new Visual Studio 11 is completely overhauled. It now follows the Metro principles of clean UI that uses typography and white space for layouting instead of lines. Below are two screenshots of the UI in the beta version.

As you can see, it’s completely different compared to Visual Studio 2010. Themes are supported, so you’ll be able to design whatever theme you want. An in-depth discussion of these changes can be found on the Visual Studio Team Blog.

The product pages have also been updated with information about the upcoming releases. One new version of the product is called “Team Foundation Server Express Beta”, which is a free collaboration software targeted at small teams. Read more about it here.

Daniel Moth from the C++ AMP development team has posted an interesting blog post about double precision floating point arithmetic support in C++ AMP and its limitations on current hardware.

Read it here.

I received an amazing email from the Microsoft Community Program Manager stating the following:

“Congratulations on being awarded MVP of the Year based on your contributions in 2011!”

It goes without saying that it’s a great honor to receive this title 🙂

This year, there are 29 MVP’s awarded with the MVP of the Year title, out of around 4000 MVP’s.
I would like to congratulate all MVP’s receiving the title.

On the 1st of March there will be an honorary dinner in Bellevue/Seattle sponsored by S. Somasegar, Senior Vice President of the Developer Division at Microsoft together with other executives and community leads in the division. I’m really looking forward to this dinner.

A while ago, I’ve posted the following posts on this blog:

• Slides of Presentation “Introduction to Microsoft C++ AMP”
• Mandelbrot Using C++ AMP

Those articles were written using the Visual C++ 11 Developer Preview.

Starting with Visual C++ 11 Beta, there will be a few small changes to the C++ AMP specification compared to the C++ AMP in the Visual C++ 11 Developer Preview. Tamer Afify from the C++ AMP team explains it as follows in his blog post:

“In the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview, C++ AMP had a grid class that was basically an extent, plus an index object representing an origin. In the Beta we have removed grid from the programming model and instead you simply use an extent. Also the tiled_grid class was removed and a tiled_extent class is introduced with the same functionality that tiled_grid provided.”

Every API that returned or accepted a grid or tiled_grid now returns or accepts an extent or tiled_extent. Most C++ AMP code can be modified with a simple find and replace operation. The find and replace operation is a bit more complicated if you have set the origin parameter of your grid to something other than the default zero index object. Check Tamer Afify blog post for more details.

Once the Visual C++ 11 Beta has been released, I will write an update for my above presentation slides and my Mandelbrot implementation.

GoingNative 2012 was a 48 hour, globally live-streamed technical event for those who push the boundaries of general purpose computing by exploiting the true capabilities of the underlying machine: C++ developers. Distinguished speakers included the creator of C++, Bjarne Stroustrup, C++ Standards Committee Chair, Herb Sutter, C++ template and big compute master, Andrei Alexandrescu, STL master Stephan T. Lavavej, LLVM/Clang developer Chandler Carruth, distributed and parallel computing expert Hans Boehm, and C++ library design expert and ISO committee member Andrew Sutton.

“C++11 feels like a new language” says C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup, who presented the keynote at the event.

You can watch the entire GoingNative 2012 streaming video from here.

Below is a list of all individual sessions. Downloads of each individual session will come online in the coming days. These sessions are a must-see for C++ developers.

Day 1 – C++11 Today (Feb 2, 2012)

• 17:30 – 19:00 UTC: [Keynote] Bjarne Stroustrup: C++11 Style
• 19:15 – 20:15 UTC: Hans Boehm: Threads and Shared Variables in C++11
• 21:15 – 22:15 UTC: Stephan T. Lavavej: STL11 – Magic && Secrets
• 22:30 – 23:30 UTC: Andrei Alexandrescu: Variadic Templates are Funadic
• 00:00 – 01:15 UTC: Panel: The Importance of Being Native (Bjarne, Andrei, Herb, Hans)

Day 2 – C++11 Today and Tomorrow (Feb 3, 2012)

• 17:30 – 19:00 UTC: [Keynote] Herb Sutter: C++11, VC++11 and Beyond
• 19:15 – 20:15 UTC: Chandler Carruth: Clang – Defending C++ from Murphy’s Million Monkeys
• 21:15 – 22:15 UTC: Andrei Alexandrescu: Static If I Had a Hammer
• 22:30 – 23:30 UTC: Bjarne Stroustrup and Andrew Sutton: A Concept Design for C++
• 00:00 – 01:15 UTC: Panel: Ask Us Anything! (all speakers)

As promised, Microsoft has released an open specification of C++ AMP: Accelerated Massive Parallelism 🙂
This allows other compiler vendors to implement support for C++ AMP on any platform.

Read the official announcement.

Download the specification.

Here are the slides of my presentation on C++ AMP that I gave to software engineers at my company.

It is time to start taking advantage of the computing power of GPUs…

A while ago I wrote an article about how to use the Microsoft Parallel Patterns Library (PPL) to render the Mandelbrot fractal using multiple CPU cores. That article can be found here.

This new article will make the Mandelbrot renderer multiple times faster by using a new Microsoft technology called C++ AMP: Accelerated Massive Parallelism, introduced in the Visual C++ 11 Preview.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Belgian C++ User Group is organizing a dinner on Monday 13th of February at 19:00, somewhere in the Brussels area, but the place depends on the number of people coming.

Already joining us:

• Tarek Madkour from Microsoft, Principal Program Manager Lead in the Visual C++ team
• Jim Hogg from Microsoft, his main focus is C++ compiler optimizations

If you ever wanted to speak directly with the Microsoft Visual C++ development team, now is your chance.
If you know any C++ people that would be interested in this, please tell them about it.

Since I need to make reservations somewhere, please let me know (marc.gregoire@nuonsoft.com) before 31st of January if you are joining us for dinner.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask me.

PS: this is not a sponsored dinner, so everyone should pay for themselves, but that shouldn’t be a problem I hope.