What’s New in Visual Studio 2017 for C++ Development

Visual Studio 2017 has been officially launched today. The release notes contain a summary of all the changes available in the new version. This post is focused on the changes for C++ development.

The Visual C++ team has released a series of blog posts to document some of the new features. Here is a list of them:

Of all the changes and new features in VC++ 2017 (that are described in details in the articles mentioned above) there are several that I want to mention:

  • The C++ compiler is C++14 complete, but still lacks several C++98 and C++11 features. It also contains some features added to C++17.
  • The standard library implementation contains C++17 features including: any, optional, variant, string_view, make_from_tuple(). The complete list of improvements is available here.
  • Visual C++ 2017 runtime is compatible to the Visual C++ 2015 runtime. That means you can link to libraries build with VC++ 2015.
  • The C++ compiler version is 19.1, a minor release of the Visual C++ 2015 compiler (version 19.0). That means _MSC_VER is 1910. On the other hand, MFC and ATL are still on version 14.0 as in Visual C++ 2015. That means _MFC_VER and _ATL_VER ar both 0x0E00.
  • It is possible to open code from any folder with the Open Folder feature and get IntelliSense, navigation, building, and debugging capabilities without creating a solution and project first.
  • You can build your projects with CMake that is now supported in Visual Studio.
  • There is a built-in support for using another C++ compiler, such as Clang or GCC (mainly intended for building projects that target Android, Linux or Mac).
  • The C++ Core Checkers for enforcing the C++ Core Guidelines are now distributed with Visual Studio.
  • Installation of Visual Studio has been redesigned. Components are delivered in “workloads”, but individual components can be added or removed. For C++ there are five workloads: Universal Windows Platform development, Desktop Development with C++, Game development with C++, Mobile development with C++, and Linux development with C++.
  • Installation folder is not c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 15.0 as with previous version, but c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\.

Here are a couple of screenshots from installing Visual Studio:

2 Replies to “What’s New in Visual Studio 2017 for C++ Development”

  1. In the new VS 2017, where is the wizard for a simple c++ mfc dialog based project? I can’t find this type of project wizard.

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