About code. Mostly on C++
Microsoft has announced the availability of Visual Studio 2010 & .NET 4.0 beta 1 for MSDN subscribers starting this Monday, and for the public starting this Wednesday. According to Kirill Osenkon, 95% of the planned functionality is already there. This new version of Visual Studio is WPF based. Among the many new features, one important … Read more
After 4 releases of Visual Studio with Help 2 engine, Visual Studio 2010 will bring yet another change: a new help engine, called MS Help 3. The first beta will ship only with online support, but the second beta should contain offline support too. Changes in the new system include: the new help files have … Read more
The new MFC library from Visual Studo 2010 supports another Vista specific feature, the task dialog. This is meant as a replacement for the classic dialog box, and can display command links, customized buttons, customized icons, and a footer. Here is an example of such a dialog (from Windows Server 2008). MFC contains a new … Read more
One of the new features available in MFC in the Visual Studio 2010 CTP is the Restart Manager. This was introduced with Windows Vista to offer support for restarting application when a crash occurs or when an automatic update needs to close and then restart an application. When you create a new MFC project in … Read more
One of the new features in .NET 4.0 is the BigInteger class. This was suppose to be part of 3.5 framework, but after the CTP it was gone. Now it’s back. This big integer is a really large integer representation. However, I was not able to find the precision documented anywhere. The class is available … Read more
A few days ago, Microsoft, through Jason Zander, General Manager of Visual Studio, has revealed the new look of Visual Studio 2010 at the VSLive conference. Several screenshots and description of the new look you can find on Zander’s blog. The new editor is using WPF and makes extensive usage of .NET 4.0. Here is … Read more
The new C++ standard defines a new keyword, static_assert, that is already available in Visual Studio 2010 CTP. This new feature allows introducing compile time asserts. It takes an expression that can evaluate to bool and a string. If the expression evaluates to false, the compiler issues an error with the given string literal. If … Read more
The new C++0x standard adds lambda expressions to the language. Visual Studio 2010 CTP is already supporting this new feature that brings functional techniques to C++ too. What is a lambda expression? It’s basically a function. In F# it’s an anonymous function, in C# it’s an anonymous delegate; in C++ it’s in fact an anonymous … Read more
So far, C#, unlike C++, did not support optional arguments. For instance, suppose you need a function to print log a message, that can add a new line or not after writing the message. Most of the times you want a new line, so you don’t want to specify that for most of the calls. … Read more
The new C++0x standard provides support for type inference. The auto keyword that was doing nothing in C++ was given a new meaning: a placeholder for a type inferred by the compiler. For those familiar with C#’s var keyword, this is basically the same. Here is a comparison between auto in C++ and var in … Read more