Marc Gregoire’s Blog

Yesterday, I wrote a post about the fact that C++0x was unanimously approved.
Today, we got confirmation from Geneva that they will officially publish the new C++ standard in a matter of weeks with the name “ISO/IEC 14882:2011(E) Programming Languages — C++, Third Edition“, which means we can start calling it C++11

See also Herb Sutter’s update on his blog.

Now I can finalize the last pieces for my “Professional C++, Second Edition” book (Wiley/Wrox).

This is a great day for the C++ world! 🙂

The new C++ standard has been unanimously approved and is now an international standard.
It can still take a few months before it’s officially published, so the question still remains whether it will be called C++11 or C++12. I for sure hope it will be C++11 🙂
Here is Herb Sutter’s blog post about it.

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.

Gelukkig Nieuwjaar

Happy New Year

Sretna Nova Godina

Bonne Année

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.
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Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta. It’s available right now for MSDN subscribers and will be available to everyone on Thursday.

It includes a new help viewer that I mentioned in my previous blog entry and “Win7-specific MFC APIs to support use of Direct2D, DirectWrite, and Windows Animation Technologies”. I can’t wait to try those out 🙂

Get more details here.

Microsoft is planning to include a new help viewer with Visual Studio 2010 SP1, which is long overdue 🙂

You can see a presentation here.

Here is a list of free eBooks related to Microsoft technologies.

• Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 (10 chapters by Patrice Pelland, Pascal Paré, and Ken Haines)
• Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 (10 chapters by Ross Mistry and Stacia Misner)
• Petzold’s Programming Windows Phone 7 (1000 pages by Charles Petzold)
• Own Your Future: Update Your Skills with Resources and Career Ideas from Microsoft (8 chapters by Katherine Murray)
• Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions (Second Edition) (6 chapters by Mitch Tulloch)
• First Look Microsoft Office 2010 (14 chapters by Katherine Murray)
• Windows 7 troubleshooting tips (short eBook by Mitch Tulloch)
• Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2 (9 chapters by Charlie Russel and Craig Zacker)
• Deploying Windows 7, Essential Guidance (10 chapters from the Windows 7 Resource Kit and 6 TechNet articles)

Enjoy 🙂

Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 to MSDN subscribers which extends testing, code visualization and modeling capabilities in VS2010. Its main features are more advanced platform and tool support for both manual and automated testing scenarios. It allows you to better control your Silverlight 4 testing scenarios and UI testing code.

Feature Pack 2 includes the following C++ related additions:

• Generate Dependency Graphs for C and C++ Code
• Validate C and C++ Code Against Layer Diagrams

Feature Pack 2 is cumulative and includes Feature Pack 1.

Get more information here.

I just stumbled upon an article mentioning that Evernote abandoned WPF and the Microsoft .NET framework and rewrote their application from scratch in native C++ code 🙂 The official reason given:

The blurry fonts, slow startup times, large memory footprint, and poor support for certain graphics cards were all issues that the technology behind 3.5 was incapable of resolving. As a result, we ended up chasing down platform bugs rather than adding the great features our users wanted.

Read the article here.

Here are a couple of pictures from our trip to Sarajevo. Of course, for lunch we had Ćevapčići 🙂
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CppDepend is a tool that you can use to analyze your C/C++ code. I gave it a try and it’s pretty powerful. CppDepends has support for 60 different code metrics. It has something called Code Query Language (CQL) that allows you to perform queries on your code like the following:

• Which public methods have more than 30 lines of code?
  SELECT METHODS WHERE NbLinesOfCode > 30 AND IsPublic
• Which classes derive From CBase?
  SELECT TYPES WHERE IsClass AND DeriveFrom “CBase”
• Which methods have been refactored recently ?
  SELECT METHODS WHERE CodeWasChanged

It can generate several different kind of graphical representations of your code, for example:

I think this tool will help a lot when working on a new code base to understand the structure of the code.

Here is a description from the vendor:

Improve your code base quality.
CppDepend is a tool that simplifies managing a complex C/C++ (Native,Mixed and COM) code base. Architects and developers can analyze code structure, specify design rules, do effective code reviews and master evolution by comparing different versions of the code.

Refactor and Improve your design and architecture.
CppDepend provides useful graphs to analyze your design and architecture. CQL language gives you a flexibility to create your custom queries and have a deep view of your code base.

Assist your migration.
Understanding the existing code base is primordial before any migration. CppDepend helps you in your migration process.

Visit the CppDepend site.

The last stop on our roadtrip was Geneva. Here are some pictures.
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