Marc Gregoire’s Blog

The Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 CTP (Community Technology Preview) has been released.

Note that this is an early preview look. A number of walkthroughs are included. Features outside these walkthroughs might still not be finished.

C++ is not being forgotten 🙂 The CTP contains a preview of a new concurrency library for C++ to make it easier to write native parallel code. I definitely will be taking a closer look on that.

Find out more here.

The C++0x standard defines a feature called auto type determination. It is similar to the var keyword in C#. It allows you to let the compiler figure out the type of a variable. For example:

auto something = 123;

The compiler will automatically figure out that something is of type int. The above is a very simple example and in this case the developer can easily figure it out. However, with template types and template meta programming techniques it can become difficult for the developer to figure out what the type exactly is.
Consider the following loop:

for (vector<string>::const_reverse_iterator criter = vec.rbegin(); criter != vec.rend(); ++criter) {...}

With the auto feature this could be rewritten as follows:

for (auto criter = vec.rbegin(); criter != vec.rend(); ++criter) {...}

which is much easier to type.

This auto feature is also useful for variables that store a function pointer or lambda expressions because the compiler will figure out the exact type for us. Lambda expressions will be briefly described in another blog post.

I was trying to port a screensaver from Visual Studio 2005 to Visual Studio 2008.

After loading the project in VS2008, compilation went without any problems. However, when I tried to test the screensaver on a Windows XP box I got the error message that the function ChangeWindowMessageFilter could not be found in user32.dll. The first thing I did was to open the MSDN and search for this ChangeWindowMessageFilter function. According to the documentation ChangeWindowMessageFilter is only available on Windows Vista. I obviously didn’t use that function myself otherwise I would have known about it in the first place 😉 So I checked the libraries that I was linking to. The most obvious candidate would be the ScrnSave.lib library. I searched for it and it was linking to the version that was installed by Visual Studio 2008 in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Lib. To make sure I did a “dumpbin /symbols ScrnSave.Lib” on it and it was indeed using the ChangeWindowMessageFilter function.

It is pretty strange that this ScrnSave.Lib is dependent on a Vista API call. This just annoys developers that try to create a screensaver that still works on Windows XP. It should be pretty easy for the developers of ScrnSave.Lib to dynamically load the user32.dll and see if ChangeWindowMessageFilter is available.

Anyway, the easiest and quickest workaround that I’m using right now is to use the ScrnSave.Lib from the Visual Studio 2005 installation. After recompiling my screensaver with this older library it works again on Windows XP.

LINQ (Language Integrated Query) is a recent powerful addition to the .NET framework and allows you to query your data sources in an elegant and simple way. In this post I’ll give a very brief introduction to LINQ and how it makes your code much more readable. Read the rest of this entry »

The Microsoft Visual Studio Ecosystem team has officially launched the new Visual Studio Gallery site at http://visualstudiogallery.com/. This new web site is a resource center for all Visual Studio extensions and includes everything from free VS PowerToys like tools to VSIP products. Any developer can post information and a link for their Visual Studio extensions. The goal for this website is to give developers an easy way to find extensions for Visual Studio. Visual Studio extensions might include products and free applications in the form of macros, add-ins, packages, project templates, or other types of extensions to Visual Studio that are packaged up and ready to use by the developer to improve their development experience.

See also the announcement on the VSX Team Blog.

Maybe a bit late, but for those who missed the announcement, Microsoft has released a beta of the Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack.

The Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack extends the VC++ Libraries shipped with Visual Studio 2008.New MFC features include:

• Office Ribbon style interface
• Office 2007, Office 2003 and Office XP look and feel
• Modern Visual Studio-style docking toolbars and panes
• Fully customizable toolbars and menus
• A rich set of advanced GUI controls
• Advanced MDI tabs and groups
• And much more!

This feature pack also includes an implementation of TR1. Portions of TR1 are scheduled for adoption in the upcoming C++0x standard as the first major addition to the ISO 2003 standard C++ library. The following feature are currently supported:

• Smart pointers
• Regular expression parsing
• New containers (tuple, array, unordered set, etc)
• Sophisticated random number generators
• Polymorphic function wrappers
• Type traits
• And more!

Note: This feature pack does not include C99 compatibility or support for special math functions.

Download the beta.

Microsoft TechDays are the new Microsoft Developer & IT Pro Days. TechDays 2008 will be held in Ghent (Belgium) on March 12 and 13. March 11 is the official launch of brand new versions of Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 in Belgium & Luxembourg.

The following speakers will be on the TechDays 2008:

• Scott Schnoll, Microsoft Corporation
• Ward Ralston, Microsoft Corporation
• Tony Krijnen, Microsoft Netherlands
• Dandy Weyn, Microsoft Corporation
• Kurt Roggen, Guidance
• Jan De Clercq, HP
• and more…

If you are interested in this event or want more information, just click the banner below.