About code. Mostly on C++
The larger a VC++ project is (or any project for that matter) the more time it takes to build. If you have solutions with many large projects the build times could get into your way. Starting a rebuild and going to lunch was a common scenario for me, as building took 20-25 minutes. Of course, … Read more
Go to definition (F12 in Visual Studio) is such an intensively used command, but it opens a new window for the document. Visual Studio 2013 adds a new go to definition command that actually displays the definition inline, in the same window. It’s called Peek Definition and the shortcut is ALT+F12. It opens an embedded … Read more
CPtrArray is a nasty MFC container that should not be used. However, if you deal with legacy code you may not have a choice and have to work with it. Unfortunately, the Visual Studio debugger is not able to display its elements, since these are pointers to void and that can be anything. In this … Read more
Visual Studio 2013 provides developers with the ability to sign in with a Microsoft account and synchronize settings across devices (and as new versions will be released across different versions of Visual Studio). When you first launch Visual Studio 2013 you are asked to sign in (you can skip that and do it any time … Read more
The Problem You install a .NET redistributable package and want to reference the assemblies in your project. However, though everything is correctly installed to GAC, the assemblies don’t show up in Visual Studio’s Add Reference dialog in the .NET tab (regardless of what version of Visual Studio you have). The Cause Redistributable assemblies are intended … Read more
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
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
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