Marc Gregoire’s Blog

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.

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.

I’m honored to have become a Microsoft Extended Experts Team Member (MEET).

The official page gives the following description of the MEET program:

Do you have a complex problem, but not the knowledge to solve it? Then you can get in contact with a community of Belgian experts.
All MEET members are selected for their knowledge and skills in their field. And they are also excellent communicators. All share knowledge through their personal blogs and they are also frequent speakers at Microsoft events or their respective user group.
MEET gets the explicit support of Microsoft Belgium and Luxembourg.

I’m going to try to get a C++ User Group going in Belgium, and got support from the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) Belux Team 🙂
Here is the official call for action:

Are you passionate about C++ and interested in finding like-minded people? Feel like coming together, setting an informal User Group in 2012? We’d like to support you in that and have a call to action for you.

Marc Gregoire, C++ MVP and author of the book Professional C++, 2nd Edition is one of the folks passionate about the technology and interested in starting up a more active C++ community in Belgium. Are you interested? Join Marc and the MSDN Belux Team for an informal discussion at the Microsoft office in Zaventem on Tuesday January 10th 2012 at 6:30 PM.

Contact Marc through email, leave a note on the MSDN Belux Team blog or reach out to Katrien De Graeve from MSDN Belux via her Twitter and we’ll see you in January.

If you are looking for some of the other Microsoft technology communities there is the full listing here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/nl-be/cc196311.

If you want to know which events Microsoft Belgium is organizing, take a look at www.msdn-events.be. There you’ll find a list of Live Meetings, Offline Events, Community Events, …

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 »