About code. Mostly on C++
I am building a hybrid mobile app with Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova that is able to make phone calls, send text message or emails, view a location on a map, etc. These are all handled with external applications (for instance use Gmail to send an email or Maps to pinpoint a location). They … Read more
Visual Studio 2015 comes with many new features and improvements in the IDE, the debugger or language compilers. Obviously, there are more than three things I like in the new IDE, but three things have caught my attention from the very beginning. The Error Window One of the things that bothered me the most about … Read more
I have tried to assemble together information about the Visual C++ releases, the compiler and the frameworks (MFC and ATL). You can find these on many places, but it is often incomplete or focused on something particular (Visual Studio, C++ compiler, framework, etc.). The table below is the result of this effort. It is incomplete … Read more
If you work on a Apache Cordova project in Visual Studio 2013 using Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova CTP 3 or 3.1 you should know there are important breaking changes in migrating the project from Visual Studio 2013 to Visual Studio 2015. The project can be migrated, but you have to do everything manually, … Read more
In Visual Studio 2015 MFC comes with a new features (something that has rarely happen in recent years): support for dynamic dialog layout. That means library support for moving and resizing controls on a dialog. In this article I will show how this feature works. Suppose we have the following dialog: What we want is … Read more
guidgen.exe is a small utility that comes with Visual Studio and generates GUIDs in a variety of formats. The problem with the tool is that it does not format GUIDs in plain text, which I happen to need many times (in source code, database tables, etc.) and I suppose is a feature needed by many … Read more
Visual Studio 2015 is out and comes with lots of new features and improvements (see details here) but it also surprised me with what I call a demoting of C++ again to a second-class citizen, after some years when it looked like it regained importance at Microsoft. I’m saying Microsoft has demoted C++ because they … Read more
When you create a Cordova project with Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova it generates a set of splash screens for all supported iOS (both iPhone and iPad) resolutions. These are found under res\screens\ios. There are two things to notice here: First, the names in Visual Studio are like screen-iphone-portrait.png or screen-ipad-portrait.png and in XCode … Read more
Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova (VSCordovaTools for short) is a great Visual Studio toolset to develop hybrid applications for multiple platforms, including Android, iOS and Windows. One of the nice things about the tool is that it installs everything you need to develop with Cordova. You don’t have to care about installing multiple components, … Read more
I was working on transforming a Windows Store app into an Universal app so that it worked not just for Windows Store but also for Windows Phone. When you do this two new projects are added to the solution. One of them is a special one, called shared project that you can use to keep … Read more