Highlights from Microsoft Build 2020

The Microsoft Build 2020 event happened this week, and, unlike all previous editions, it was a digital event only. Moreover, it was also free, so everybody could attend the 48 hours marathon. Microsoft made a lot of announcements and released various products and services for Windows, Azure, Office, Visual Studio, Edge, and more. In this post, I will summarize the things that I found the most interesting for me.

Using Microsoft Edge in a native Windows desktop app – part 2

In the second part of this series, we will see how to use the WebView2 control in a C++ Windows desktop application. We will use a single document interface MFC application that features a toolbar where you can specify an address to navigate to and buttons to navigate back and forward as well as reloading the current page or stopping navigation.

C++/CLI projects targeting .NET Core 3.x

The .NET Core framework version 3.1 was released earlier this month, alongside with Visual Studio 2019 16.4 (which you must install in order to use .NET Core 3.1). Among the changes, it includes support for C++/CLI components that can be used with .NET Core 3.x, in Visual Studio 2019 16.4. However, not everything works out of the box. In this article, I will show how you can create and consume C++/CLI components targeting .NET Core 3.1.

Data-driven unit tests for managed code

The Microsoft unit testing code for managed code allows to create test methods that are executed with data automatically fetched from an external data source. This is very helpful because we can extend the data sets without modifying the test code. An external data source can be an SQL database, a CSV file or Excel document, an XML document, or anything else for which a provider for .NET exists. In this article, I will show how you can define test data using all these types of source and execute unit testing methods with it.

This feature is available only for .NET Framework.
At this time, data-driven unit testing from a data source is not supported for .NET Core.

Three productivity features in the Visual C++ 2017 debugger

Visual Studio 2017 has had a larger number of updates throughout its lifetime. At the time of writing this article, there have been ten major updates and countless minor ones. You can check the release notes history for details. Part of the changes was in the debugger. In this article, I will mention three features…

A first look at Visual Studio 2019

The first preview version of Visual Studio 2019 is available since the beginning of December 2018. I decided to take a look to see what is different from the previous Visual Studio 2017 version. In this post, I will present some of the things that are new or changed in this new version.