Marc Gregoire’s Blog

Barco has created a nice flyer for the Belgian C++ Users Group event of January 9th 2018.

The next meeting of the Belgian C++ Users Group is planned for Tuesday January 9th, 2018 at 18:00 at Barco.

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

The agenda is as follows:

• 18:00: Sandwiches.
• 18:30: Session 1: Threads are evil (Frederik Vannoote)
  Many applications beyond the scope of “Hello World” use threads for various reasons. Be it for having many sequential execution paths, preventing a blocked UI or offloading CPU intensive tasks to the background.
  However threads don’t come for free. They suddenly add a complex dimension to a simple application. Who dares to claim to have written a flawless threaded application? Is it really bringing a performance boost?
  Let’s have a closer look to what we are facing when using threads and what alternatives we have.
• 19:00: Session 2: Legacy code refactoring case (Roeland Van Lembergen)
  Going from legacy C++ code to state of the art tested and testable code by means of focused refactoring and componentization. Building a future proof platform using code generation.
• 19:30: Break
• 19:45: Session 3: Boost.Asio C++ (Network) Programming (Lieven de Cock)
  Boost.Asio is a cross-platform C++ library for network and low-level I/O programming, either using a synchronous or asynchronous model. We will examine this powerful library in 2 sessions. The first session will first focus on using it as a task processor, something to offload work to, in a nice scaling way with respect to threads. Next we will have a look at timers based upon this library. Equipped with the basic techniques we will start looking at the networking part, first examining some structures and some first network activities, and if time permits it we will implement a first network client. From this talk on boos:asio:ioservice is ready to service you!
  In the second session we will dive head first in the network programming with no further limits.
  Note that the C++ Standard networking proposals are based directly on Boost.Asio, so next to learning this great library we are also preparing for the future C++ standard.
• 20:45: Experience tour by Barco (Laserprojection/extreme surround sound in new cinema format, operation room for healthcare, control room, entertainment/concerts…), 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.

Note: The deadline for registrations is January 5th, 2018!

The next meeting of the Belgian C++ Users Group is planned for Tuesday April 11th, 2017 at 18:00 at VUB.

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

The agenda is as follows:

• 18:00: Sandwiches.
• 18:30: Session 1: Challenges in Modern Embedded Development Using C++ (Glyn Matthews)
  This talk will cover things such as constrained systems (e.g. CPU, cache, memory), older compilers affecting the use of library and language features from the 2011 standard and beyond, porting, testing etc. One theme will be that what’s “standard” and “modern” is not what you need to get your software working. In some ways, I’d like to push back a bit on the trend to more modern code bases, because it turns out it’s quite rare for developers to have access to the latest language features (and by “latest” I mean 6 years old…)
• 19:30: Break
• 19:45: Session 2: SFINAE and type traits: In the Mix (Lieven de Cock)
  The journey will start with a test drive of simple method overloading, shortly later enriched with some ‘templates’ laps. Then we shift gears and we add type traits to the mix. In order to arrive at the finish line, some SFINAE herbs are added to spice up the mix. And as the proof of the pudding is in the eating, a small use case, which will bring things together, will be served.
  In the end the main question remaining is: do we std::enable_if some drinks afterward?
• 20:45: Short presentation and demo by SoftKinetic 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 April 4th, 2017!

The next meeting of the Belgian C++ Users Group is planned for Tuesday January 24th, 2017 at 18:00 at Nobel Biocare.

Nobel Biocare ( https://www.nobelbiocare.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, Part 2? (Peter Van Weert)
  This talk will continue the talk from November 2016, giving an overview of all the new features scheduled to be included in C++17. This second part will focus more on library changes.
• 19:30: Break
• 19:45: Session 2: Coming to terms with C++ in a huge financial application (Cosmin Cremarenco)
  Murex is a large financial application – ~15M lines of code of C/C++. Migrating from C to C++ has come with enormous challenges. Essential components had to be upgraded to what a C++ programmer naturally expects today. A legacy object framework based on C had to be deprecated in favour of C++, the build system had to be upgraded, proper testing put in place, processes devised to how third-party libraries are introduced in our codebase and used and, finally, a performant serialization system that is in-line with today’s expectations on latency and throughput when communicating between components written in different or same programming language.
• 20:45: Short presentation/demo by Nobel Biocare 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 January 20th, 2017!

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 🙂