Marc Gregoire’s Blog

Microsoft has officially announced the launch date for Windows 8: October 26th 2012 🙂

See the official source here.

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. )

Most op you will know by now that the Visual Studio 11 Beta UI is rather gray. There was a lot of feedback about this from the communities, and it seems Microsoft is listening. They have announced a couple of UI changes to bring back some color to the UI.

Check out this blog post for a description of the changes, including before and after screenshots. I definitely like the new upcoming changes 🙂

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

Microsoft has announced the different Windows 8 editions. There will be: Windows 8, Windows 8 Pro, and Windows RT. Windows 8 and Windows 8 Pro are versions of Windows for x86 CPU’s (32 and 64 bit), while Windows RT is for ARM CPU’s. Check this blog to get a table with the differences between the 3 flavors of Windows 8.

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.

The Metro UI of Windows 8 works completely different compared to the Windows 7 and 8 desktop UI.
You might need a little help to find your way around.
Kent Walter wrote an excellent article explaining how the Metro UI works and how to use it efficiently, including an overview of all Windows shortcuts.
Read it here.

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.

My brother had a Samsung SyncMaster 214T LCD monitor of which the backlight stopped working. It all started with the monitor requiring several off/on cycles before the backlight would work, and it ended with the backlight never turning on anymore.

Since the monitor was out of warranty, I decided to open it before throwing it away. Once opened, I noticed that 6 capacitors were either bulging or were already leaking. So, instead of throwing the monitor away, I went to the nearest electonics store, bought 6 new capacitors for a total of around 2 euro or so. I replaced the six capacitors, and voila, the monitor is in perfect condition again 🙂

Below are the steps I took. Read the rest of this entry »

TechEd Europe this year will be in Amsterdam from 26th of June till 29th of June.
If you register before 31st of March you’ll save €300.

TechEd offers over 400 breakout sessions spread across 12 tracks featuring diverse technologies at a level of detail unmatched in the industry – from understanding the latest business productivity solutions to diving deeper on Microsoft’s Cloud strategy. TechEd also features over 250 self-paced labs created by product experts, and is an ideal place to pick up new ideas and skills to increase productivity and build better solutions.

Plus TechEd Europe offers an additional day of deep training via the pre-conference seminars happening on Monday, 25 June. These day-long sessions will enhance your learning experience through supplemental in-depth, comprehensive training. Take an accelerated path to the certifications and skills you need to increase your professional appeal and prepare to add new value in the real world, with an extended skill set you can put to use immediately.

One of the pre-conference seminars is all about C++, “C++ in 2012: Modern, Readable, Safe, Fast”, see details.

All the recorded content and slides from TechDays 2012, including related downloads and content, is now online.
Enjoy 🙂

23rd of March is the Belgian Windows 8 Developer Day.
Subscribe to the day-track to immerse, and the night-track to start building. Totally free… totally Windows 8.

Join the first Windows 8 Developer Day in Belgium! A full day conference with technical sessions that dive into the platform for building Windows 8 Metro Style apps.

With Windows 8 Consumer Preview just released, you’ll learn first-hand how to:

• use the new features in Windows 8 Metro apps to your advantage
• use the developer platform with C#, C++, XAML, HTML and JavaScript
• monetize and distribute your app

Your keynote speaker is Giorgio Sardo, HTML5 and Windows 8 Senior Technical Evangelist at Microsoft.

When the sun sets, we dive into the night with the very first Nacht van Windows 8 / La nuit de Windows 8, an app-a-thon like you’ve never seen!
Team up with your best UX friend to build a killer team, come alone, sign up with a group, whatever you want! And win prizes with you app…

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.