About code. Mostly on C++
At the beginning of this year, Microsoft announced a “C++ renaissance”. Quoting from the description of a Channel 9 video with Craig Symonds and Mohsen Agsen: C++ is currently undergoing a renaissance. This means that, by definition, the language, compilers and compositional tooling are evolving and coalescing into a state that maximizes native developer efficiency, … Read more
Microsoft has recently announced at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit the introduction of a new technology called C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism or shortly C++ AMP that helps C++ developers use the GPU for parallel programming. The new technology will be part of Visual C++, integrated with full support (edit, build, debug, profile) in the next … Read more
I said it before, the Visual Studio installer gets me mad. All is fine until you want to install the Service Pack. After that you cannot install additional components until you uninstall the SP. Because of that, you should make sure you installed the entire Visual Studio package before installing SP1. So I did, but … Read more
Text templates (aka T4) is a great feature in Visual Studio, that proves helpful in many scenarios. I use it for instance in developing Alchemy. However, it has a significant drawback: it does not generate code automatically when you build your solution. To build the files and generate their output you have to manually run … Read more
This Wednesday Google released version 11 of the Chrome Browser. One of the most important addition was the support for speech recognition for English. One can enable speech recognition in an input field by adding the x-webkit-speech proprietary attribute, like in this example: <input type=”text” x-webkit-speech /> The result should look like this (of course, … Read more
Productivity Power Tools is a Visual Studio 2010 add-in, developed by the Microsoft Visual Studio Platform Team and available in Visual Studio Gallery. Of course, you can also download it using Visual Studio Extension Manager, from the Tools menu in Visual Studio 2010. Its list of features is detailed on the add-in page and I … Read more
I’m using Red Gate’s .NET Reflector for decompiling .NET assemblies. It’s a great tool but it lacks, at least in the free version I’m using, information about the platform architecture of an assembly. Sometimes I want to know whether an assembly was built for Any CPU, x86 or x64. The tool that help you find … Read more
When you run your (unmanaged/C++) application in debugger, you see at the end a report of memory leaks (if any are detected). Something like this: Detected memory leaks! Dumping objects -> f:\dd\vctools\vc7libs\ship\atlmfc\src\mfc\strcore.cpp(141) : {381} normal block at 0x001FFC30, 54 bytes long. Data: < x > 0C 00 B9 78 12 00 00 00 12 00 … Read more
A week ago I was reporting about the problems I had experienced with Office 2010. That was not the end of the story, and it’s probably fair enough to tell how it ends. After installing Office 2010 64 bit and then 32 bit and both crashing every other 5 minutes, I returned to Office 2007. … Read more
A new version (1.3) of VSBuildStatus add-in for Visual Studio 2005, 2008 and 2010 is available. It allows you to configure the add-in window to automatically show up when a build/clean/deploy process starts, and/or automatically close when the operation ends. To enable the automatic show of the add-in window when a build/clean/deploy operation starts, check … Read more