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…

Troubles with Windows SDK

I recently installed a fresh copy of Visual Studio 2017 on a new machine and went on to build several projects some of them being VC++. The trouble was that I immediately run into a problem (actually the first problem was that MFC & ATL were missing because I forgot to check that in the list of Individual components so I had to install them separately). The problem was an error with a missing new.h header:

1>c:\program files (x86)\microsoft visual studio\2017\enterprise\vc\tools\msvc\14.15.26726\atlmfc\include\afx.h(62): fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'new.h': No such file or directory

VisualC++ Is Now Available on Compiler Explorer

Matt Godbolt has announced today that the Visual C++ compiler is finally available on Compiler Explorer (https://godbolt.org/). Compiler Explorer is a website where you can write C/C++/Rust/Go/D code, compile it with various compilers and settings and see the resulted assembly code. #CompilerExplorer now has VS 2017 compilers! Huge thanks to @Microsoft and @apardoe! — Matt…

Building the 64-bit version of Chromium Embedded Framework on Windows

The Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF for short) is an open source framework for embedding Chromium-based browsers in other applications. The base implementation is targeting C/C++ applications but ports for other languages exist (these include Java, C#, Delphi, Python). The nightly builds (for various systems and platforms) of CEF are available for download at https://cefbuilds.com/. These…

Dynamic Dialog Layout for MFC in Visual C++ 2015

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…

CDatabase bug in MFC in VS2012

After migrating an MFC application from Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2012 I run into an unexpected error: the application was having problem fetching data from the SQL Server database. After debugging it turned out that function CDatabase::GetConnect that I was using to retrieve the connection string after opening the database (for different purposes)…