About code. Mostly on C++
Let’s say you have this VC++ project (or maybe more) targeting a 64-bit platform (x64 or IA64). You have the sources, everything is set. You build the solution and your project is skipped. You try again, maybe do a rebuild. The project is still skipped. You check the solution’s configuration manager, and the project is … Read more
DocProject with Sandcastle are a great choice for creating MSDN-style documentation. You can author conceptual documentation using MAML (Microsoft Assistance Markup Language) and reference documentation from managed assemblies and XML comments. Here is the documentation for DocProject. Writing conceptual documentation I ran into some problems that were not straight forward to solve. Hopefully these tips … Read more
Visual Studio 11 Beta was made available today (See Jason Zander’s announcement). It can be downloaded from here. These are my first impressions after downloading and trying it. The New UI I have already talked about the new Chrome theme. I find it awful, you don’t know what’s enabled and what is not. I wish … Read more
Dear Microsoft, I have recently read the two blog posts about the new “developer experience” with Visual Studio 11 (part 1 and part 2). I don’t have the IDE yet (since the beta will be made available on February 29), but from the blog posts I see that you once again changed the look and … Read more
Visual Studio 11 brings many new things for native development, including support for new features from C++11 (unfortunately not all), or ability to write Metro apps with C++/CX including modeling the UI with XAML. In this post I will talk a bit about three favorite features that I noticed immediately after trying VS11 from Windows … Read more
If you tried the Win8 Developer Preview and built WinRT components (native or managed) you noticed the .winmd files. The name stands for Windows Meta Data and the format of these files is the same used by the .NET framework for the CLI, i.e. ECMA-335. That means you can actually read these files with a … Read more
Not long ago I ran into a COM interop problem that was a bit tricky to fix. So I’m sharing the problem and the solution here in case others encounter the same problem. I had this native in-proc COM server that initially was built only for x86. It was used in a native MFC application … Read more
Partial classes are finally available to C++. Sort of. It’s not part of the new C++11 standard, it’s part of the C++/CX language developed by Microsoft for targeting WinRT on Windows 8. Partial classes mean that you can define a class spanned across several files. Why is this great? Because it allows developers and automatic … Read more
Many of you have requested an update of the game, with new elements and challenges. After lot of time in coordinating the translations, the latest update is finally ready, with the exception of the German translation which is not available for the new elements (if anyone interested in helping there, please drop a comment). Alchemy … Read more
Windows Runtime, or shortly WinRT, is a new runtime (siting on top of the Windows kernel) that allows developers to write Metro style applications for Windows 8, using a variety of languages including C/C++, C#, VB.NET or JavaScript/HTML5. Microsoft has started rolling out information about Windows 8 and the new runtime at BUILD. WinRT is … Read more