About code. Mostly on C++
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
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 have recently upgraded my SSD disk to a newer and larger one. To avoid the hassle of re-installing everything (I have a lot of things to install) I cloned the disk. Everything worked fine. No problems with the operating system and the applications, except for Visual Studio. Though I could start, edit, build, run, … Read more
Visual Studio “14” CTP ships with a refactored C Runtime. The first thing you’ll notice is that msvcrXX.dll has been replaced by three new DLLs: appcrtXX.dll, desktopcrtXX.dll and vcruntimeXX.ddl (where XX stands for the version number so in this version it’s appcrt140.dll, desktopcrt140.dll and vcruntime140.dll). You can see in this image that both desktopcrt140.dll and … Read more
Visual Studio 2012 introduced a new framework for writing debugger visualizers for C++ types that replaced the old autoexp.dat file. The new framework offers xml syntax, better diagnostics, versioning and multiple file support. Visualizers are defined in XML files with extension .natvis. These visualizers are loaded each time the debugger starts. That means if you … Read more
Visual Studio 2012 provides support for new features, such as code review and feedback through the use of the Work Item tracking system in TFS. (You can read more about it in this article New Code Review feature in Visual Studio 2012). However, to be able to use these features you must use a process … Read more