Entries tagged with c++ - Channel 9

Visual C++ 10: 10 is the new 6

JasonOlson — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 16:29:00 GMT

Welcome back to another Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Week video. In this latest installment, we catch up with Amit Mohindra, Program Manager on the C++ team.

In this video, Amit takes us on a tour of Visual C++ 10. Covered are topics like the new msbuild-based build system, the new intellisense engine, some new C++0x language features, and more.

Enjoy!

This is another Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Week Video. For other Visual Studio 2010 videos, check out the Visual Studio topic area here on Channel 9.

Native Parallelism with the Parallel Patterns Library

JasonOlson — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 15:37:00 GMT

Welcome back to another Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Week video. In this latest installment, we catch up with Rick Molloy, Program Manager on the Parallel Computing Platform team.

Rick takes us on a tour of the new parallelism features coming with C++ 10 via the Parallel Patterns Library. Covered are features like task groups, structured task groups, and agents-based parallelism, among many others.

Enjoy!

This is another Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Week Video. For other Visual Studio 2010 videos, check out the Visual Studio topic area here on Channel 9.

Parallel Computing Platform: Asynchronous Agents for Native Code

Charles — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 17:27:00 GMT

Here, we continue our focus on concurrency and parallelism with native (C++) Parallel Computing Platform team members Rick Malloy, Niklas Gustafsson, Mike Chu and Stephen Toub. This conversation covers native (C++) asynchronous agents (and agent programming, generally) and pipeline architectures for concurrency. A lot of time spent at the whiteboard...

For the native developers out there I think you will be really pleased with the direction the Parallel Computing People are heading with these new C++ libraries for concurrency. Do check this out! By the way, these guys will be at the PDC so if you're going please do bring your questions!

Enjoy.

Dariusz quatscht: C++ Technical Report 1

Dariusz — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 14:43:00 GMT

Dieser Podcast hat nicht ein Interview zum Thema sondern ist eine Session von Bernd Marquardt zum Thema C++ TR1. Das ganze geht ca. eine halbe Stunde und Bernd pickt sich hier 4 Templates heraus über die er spricht. Da Bernd kein Blog besitzt, gibt es keinen Link, ich kann aber gerne den Kontakt bei Interesse herstellen.

Viel Spaß beim reinhören,

Dariusz

The Concurrency Runtime: Fine Grained Parallelism for C++

Charles — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 19:27:00 GMT

We've spent a fair amount of time on Channel 9 discussing concurrency and parallelism with various people. In particular, the folks who are writing the Parallel Computing Platform. Everything we've talked about up to this point has been targeted at .NET developers. After watching all the videos on TPL, for example, you'd think that only .NET developers will get to benefit from Task-based concurrent programming. Of course, this is not the case. Native developers (C++) will be given an equivalent level of concurrency abstraction (and in some cases more) via the native Concurrency Runtime and associated tools.

Here, native (C++ focused) Parallel Computing Platform team members Rick Malloy, Niklas Gustafsson, Don McCrady and Channel 9 veteran Stephen Toub join me in a conversation covering our concurrency platform tools and runtime specifically designed for C++ developers.

Enjoy!

The P-Invoke Interop Assistant

funkyonex — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:14:00 GMT

In this interview, Jared Parsons, a Developer on the Visual Basic IDE, shows us the P/Invoke Interop Assistant available on CodePlex. The tool helps with converting unmanaged C code to managed P/Invoke signatures and vice versa. Say goodbye to digging through random header files or MSDN documentation to find the right constants, structures and signatures. The P/Invoke Interop Assistant does a smarter translation for you using SAL (Source Code Annotation Language).

Enjoy,
-Beth Massi, Visual Studio Community

STL Iterator Debugging and Secure SCL

Charles — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:28:00 GMT

The Visual C++ runtime library now detects incorrect iterator use and will assert and display a dialog box at run time. To enable debug iterator support, a program must be compiled with a debug version of a C run time library (see C Run-Time Libraries for more information).

See Checked Iterators for more information on using iterators.

The C++ standard describes which member functions cause iterators to a container to become invalid. Two examples are:

Erasing an element from a container causes iterators to the element to become invalid.
Increasing the size of a vector (push or insert) causes iterators into the vector container become invalid.

Here, VC++ Software Engineer Stephan T. Lavavej digs into the details of STL Iterator Debugging including its implementation, usage scenarios and interesting facts you may not find anywhere else (Channel 9 goodness). Stephan is known as STL (this is his name's acronym, by coincidence or perhaps it's simply prophetic since Stephan is a passionate advocate for STL, as you will no doubt understand after watching and listening to this conversation). Stephan also dives a bit into Secure SCL, which is part of the VC++ Safe Libraries.

Stephan does not possess a marketing bone in his body as you can tell by his commentary that's weaved into his informal presentation of advanced topics. I love this. He speaks his mind freely, though with fairness, and that's the only way to be.

Enjoy!

This Week on Channel 9: Clint Rutkas stops by, Project Velocity, Live Writer SDK, C9 bytes on IIS 7.0 and F#, and shameless self-promotion

Dan — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:51:00 GMT

This Week on Channel 9, Dan and Brian are joined by Clint Rutkas and we discuss:

Clint talks about MS 101 (0 - 1:00)
SQL Server 2008 RC0 is now available (and we don't know why some teams start with a zero based array and others don't) (1:00 - 2:30)
CTP of Project codename "Velocity" available, a Distributed object cache for Windows (2:30 - 3:40)
New CTP for the Windows Live Writer SDK including a Twitter and DiggThis example and another Live Writer plug-in by Alik Levin for building Blog Post Templates (3:40 - 5:28)
Scott Hanselman's BabySmash app makes Lifehacker (5:28 - 6:36)
Drew Robbins demos the IIS 7.0 Admin Pack (6:36 - 9:58)
Luke Hoban demos visualizing data using F# (9:58 - 13:23)
Templex a Template Process Library for Team Foundation Server (13:23 - 15:04)
Codeplex now include syntax highlighting for source code (15:04 - 16:00)
xgamer posts on CamSpace in the Coffeehouse with demo goodness (16:00 - 17:57)
Brian and Clint viciously throw 9 guys at Dan's head...in slow motion (17:57 - 18:11)
Zafer Savas releases a cool Codeproject article showing eye tracking with a Web cam using C++ (18:46 - 19:30)
Clint's Pick of the Week: Gary Farr's Coding4Fun RetroCommand arcade game using Silverlight and Expression Blend 2.5
Brian's Pick of the Week: The PDC ShowOff contest is launching with Brian and Dan hosting the event live at PDC (19:30 - 21:48)
Dan's Pick of the Week: Dan plugs his Coding4Fun talk at TechEd which showed off YouTube, iTunes, Zune, P2P, and Warcraft programming (21:48 - )

Russell Hadley: The Route to C++ Code Optimization

Charles — Tue, 20 May 2008 18:43:14 GMT

It's nice to write clean code (code that looks good, is organized, is easy for others to understand by reading it, etc). As developers we get to use great tools to implement algorithms in our favorite languages. The act of composing a program is much like that of writing a story or, in some cases, a poem :) But the underlying hardware isn't much interested in intelligent class hierachies and easy-to-understand lines of programming language syntax. Processors do not speak C++ or Java or C# or VB, etc.

The focus of this interview is mapping the (long and complicated)path to executable machine code that the machine natively understands and acts upon, bringing your code to life. How does this work, exactly?

Russell Hadley is a senior developer on the C++ team here at Microsoft and he spends his days (and nights, ocassionally) writing code that takes the front-end compilation linear (flattened) blob and turns it into highly optimized machine code patterns that the processor can execute in a highly efficient manner.

This is a deep interview with lots of whiteboarding, but it is shallow enough so you won't drown if you can't swim very well. Enjoy. This is another great conversation with one of the C++ experts who live in Building 41.

LOW RES FILE
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This Week on Channel 9: April 11th Episode

Dan — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:07:51 GMT

This Week on Channel 9, Brian and Dan cover:

- Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack Released:
- Reduce download times with OptiPNG and libJPEG, via Omar Al Zabir
- Learning Microsoft Expression via Allan Da Costa Pinto
- SMS Officer via Outlook Team Blog
- Evangelism Network Sidebar Gadgets for C8, C9, C10, Mix, and Edge - via Grace Francisco - How to configure OpenGL to work with Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition via Neil Galloway
- New version of Phoenix compiler and analysis tools available
- Clint Rutkas interviews John Cash from Blizzard Entertainment on what it takes to get a job at Blizzard.
- Brian's Pick: Team System Web Access + Work Item Web Access CTP Release via Hakan Eskici

Andy Ayers: Understanding the Phoenix Compiler Framework

Charles — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 19:19:36 GMT

The compiler gurus over in CTP of the Phoenix Compiler Framework. It's been a while since we've learned about Phoenix here on Channel 9 so we thought it necessary to find out what's going on with the soon-to-be de facto compiler technology for all of Microsoft's products.

Andy Ayers is an Architect on the Phoenix team. He sits down with us to dig into the details of Phoenix and address it's current state, history and future (no whiteboarding here, but this is still quite deep. There is a cool demo at the end of the interview.) . It's very interesting to note that the Phoenix team has tested the scalability and power of their pluggable (extensible) compiler framework on the likes of Windows. Turns out Phoenix handles such a large task (compiling Windows) very well. This new compiler technology has been designed with many-core in mind. This means Phoenix is our most parallelized compiler which adds up to shorter compilation time. As usual, the C++ team is ahead of the curve when it comes to preparing for the concurrent future.

Tune in and learn all about the future of Microsoft's compiler technology from one of the minds behind it all. The future is very bright indeed!

Enjoy!

Low res version here.

Stephan T. Lavavej: Digging into C++ Technical Report 1 (TR1)

Charles — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 19:50:20 GMT

From Effective C++, Third Edition:

TR1 ("Technical Report 1") is a specification for new functionality being added to C++'s standard library. This functionality takes the form of new class and function templates for things like hash tables, reference-counting smart pointers, regular expressions, and more.

So, what does this mean for Microsoft's Visual C++? What's being added to our suite of native libraries to support TR1? What new features will you find most useful?

Stephan T. Lavavej is a developer on the VC++ team who is implementing some of the features that will ship as part of a TR1 VC++ "Feature Pack" some time in the near future... He's really passionate about C++ and here we dig into some of his favorite new TR1 features and he explains how they work and why C++ developers should use them by default. Much of the time is spent on the whiteboard.

One of the really interesting new features of TR1 is shared_ptr (shared pointer) which provides some useful automation (memory safety) for native developers playing with pointers. shared_ptr is also performant as well as predictable. Good stuff.

Learn.

Enjoy.

Click here for low res download file.

Code To Live: Dave Donaldson on CodeKeep

joshholmes — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:47:18 GMT

Josh Holmes caught up with Dave Donaldson to talk about the cool project that he started back in 2005 called CodeKeep. This is a fantastic example of a passionate guy putting up a project that everyone can benefit from with no financial motivation.

This is one of the longer episodes so far (close to 30 minutes) but there's a lot of great content here.

Arjun Bijanki: Making Sense of VC Intellisense

Charles — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:48:11 GMT

One of the very useful features of Visual Studio is Intellisense. C# and VB programmers have come to rely on this mechanism as a one of the means to being highly productive when using VS as their dev tool. VC++ developers have not been afforded the same luxury as their other (managed) VS counterparts. Why? Well, for one thing there are big technical challenges to pulling off highly performant and accurate Intellisense for a VC++ code garden. You can imagine why given the complex structure of C++ programs...

Here, we meet Senior Developer in Test Arjun Bijanki who has been working on the VC++ front end compiler team for his entire career at Microsoft (as you'd expect, the front end compiler team owns Intellisense...).

How does Intellisense work? What are the challanges of implementing a truly useful Intellisense for VC++? When will VC++ developers get a great Intellisense experience in Visual Studio? What's the current state of the art and what's the future hold?

Tune in.

(Dan Fernandez joins in the conversation - this is Dan's first appearance on C9 as an interviewer (it was actually his first day on the job. Not surprisingly, Dan asks some very good questions.))

Here's a lo-res download version.

Everything you wanted to know about VC++ deployment but were afraid to ask

Charles — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 19:32:51 GMT

After C++ code has been written, compiled and tested it's now time for figuring out how to deploy it successfully on n number of users' machines and their various configurations... This is no easy task given the number of potential versioning conflicts. Of course, there are ways to do this, many of them automatic in nature, but which way is the best way? How do the various methodologies of delploying exes and dlls on machines stack up? How does it all work? Deployment is one of those things that many of us take for granted, but George Mileka and Ben Anderson of the Visual C++ team spend much of their time thinking about the process of deploying code to any number of machines so we don't have to. Tune in and learn about the nitty gritty of VC deployment. There is plenty of whiteboarding in this one so be sure to put your propeller caps on.

Kate Gregory, Ale Contenti and Steve Teixeira: VC++ 2008 and Beyond

Charles — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 18:38:01 GMT

At TechED Developer 2007 I was fortunate enough to catch up with C++ expert Kate Gregory and VC++ team members Ale Contenti and Steve Teixeira for a conversation in the TechED Fish Bowl. Not surprisingly, the topic we focused on was VC++ 2008, the future of VC++ and Microsoft's commitment to innovating and evolving this powerful unmanaged platform in the context of it being an unmanaged platform (as opposed to concentrating on how C++ can interop with and, in some sense compete with, managed code, etc).

We thought it would be wise to get an external C++ expert together with Microsoft C++ People to chat about what's new, where the platform is heading, the position and relevance of C++ in an increasingly managed world and other fun topics to capture a customer's feedback on camera (no where to hide, MS product people! :)).

Kate, who is a C++ MVP and fantastic speaker (her C++ sessions always rank highly among attendees) provides real world context and perspective with regard to what C++ developers want and need. The product team people, like Ale and Steve, are of course listening and acting on the feedback from C++ developers like Kate who target Windows primarily, if not entirely, in an unmanaged context.

As always, it was a pleasure to chat with Kate, Ale and Steve.

If you are a C++ developer (or interested in the future of VC++), then this interview is for you!

Enjoy,
C

Pat Brenner: New Updates to MFC in Visual Studio 2008

Charles — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 12:39:56 GMT

The VC++ team has made a committment to innovating, in a native context, both the C++ language and associated libraries. The focus of the group is squarely on making VC++ a great language for native Windows development. In Visual Studio 2008, C++ developers will get a MFC library that contains twice the functionality of previous versions.

Here, we meet Pat Brenner. Pat is a Senior SDE on the VC++ libraries team and has implemented many of the improvements to MFC in VS 2008. He's also been at Microsoft for quite some time: 19.5 years!

Tune in and learn about some of the exciting new features of MFC 2008.

Check out Soma's blog for his perspective on this (Soma runs the developer division)

geekSpeak Recording: Programming for High-Performance Computing Environments with Dariusz Parys and

glengo — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 23:22:37 GMT

We're always trying to dig up esoteric subjects for geekSpeak, and here's one that is intriguing - High Performance Computing. Once strictly the domain of universities and the like, HPC is quickly becoming a cornerstone of business analysis, engineering and number crunching in general.

This geekSpeak features several Microsoft folks from Germany, including Developer Evangelist Dariusz Parys, Platform Strategy Manager Christian Binder and infrastructure specialist Steffen Krause.

These fine gentlemen get us all familiar with key aspects of developing and managing applications for a high-performance computing environment. Steffen gives a great overview of a typical infrastructure layout, which includes Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. We get some great tips for handling multi-threading through the use of OpenMP, as well as an overview of using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) to handle the communication to the cluster.

Steffen shares with us some information around using Excel services on Sharepoint actually installed on a cluster to provide some serious horsepower for server-based calculations. And we hear about a specific HPC scenario from Sorin Serban, with Visual Numerics, involving some amazingly complex algorithms.

All in all, a fascinating geekSpeak on the possiblities that high-performance computing offers.

Ale Contenti and Louis Lafreniere: Understanding Exceptions and When/How to Handle Them

Charles — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 00:47:22 GMT

Sometimes, things go wrong when code executes. You can't predict when this will happen or even why, but you can write code to handle exceptional problems. If you're lucky, the problem will carry with it a bunch of useful information that you can use, at runtime, to handle the specific error. These exceptional information structures are called structured exceptions; blobs of bad news carrying useful and specific information that you can use to find your way out of the exceptional rabbit hole. Of course, with useful data packaged up in an exception you can more easily debug to find root causes, which is much harder to do with, say, error codes...

What is a structured exception, exactly? How should you handle exceptions that you don't assume will arise during the execution of your code? What are the correct patterns of exception handling that you can safely rely on? What does the C++ compiler have to do with exception code patterns?

Come along for ride into the deep and murky world of exceptions with some folks that truly understand them at the most fundamental levels.

Ale Contenti is a senior development lead in the C++ base class libraries team. Louis Lafreniere is a principal software developer in the C++ compiler group. Here, Ale and Louis teach us about exceptions and handling them (and when not to handle them). I love talking to the VC++ People. They live on the metal and really understand the fascinating intracacies of our platform.

Enjoy this latest interviewed Byron Cook, a researcher at MSR Cambridge, about his work on Terminator, which is a proof-based analysis tool used for proving that good things will eventually happen in unmanaged code paths. That is, it's a very good thing for code to stop executing eventually otherwise system hangs occur (drivers are the number one cause of system hangs and other undesirable system-wide problems).

Terminator is designed to help developers find bugs in their code that cause non-terminating execution. Many of you provided feedback after the last interview that Byron should have gone a bit deeper into the technology, including whiteboarding proofs. Well, he was recently in Redmond and agreed to be the next participant in here.

Byron Cook: Terminator - Proving Good Things Will Eventually Happen

Charles — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 15:31:52 GMT

Here's another installment from MSR Cambridge (much more to come). This time, I was lucky enough to get some time with Byron Cook, a researcher in MSR's Programming Principles and Tools group focusing on static analysis of system code to hunt for algorithms and code fragments that will most likely induce a system state lovingly referred to by all as a Hang. You know, when nothing seems to work anymore, you can't use your mouse or keyboard, windows are frozen in time and you resort to a hard reboot. Well, what is a hang, exactly? How is a hang directly related to events? Did you know that a typical hang is event-related (never ending event response) caused by kernel mode code (drivers mostly) that never, well, terminates?

Byron and team have written a very interesting tool that analyzes code, tests it against proofs of correctness (mathematical proofs, indeed) and alerts developers at design time that some code they've written is heading down a very slippery slope that will end in a hang. Terminator is proof based. OK. How does Terminator work, you ask? Proofs? It's all about prooving termination.

Please tune in and find out. This is a really cool introduction to the notion of mathematically prooving that good things will eventually happen in code.

PS. I just found out that, like myself, Byron is an Evergreen State College alumnus. Small world!

OSIsoft: Real-Time Monitoring and Analytics - The Power of PI, Part 2

Charles — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 17:54:18 GMT

Global carbon regulation is arguably the largest risk and opportunity most corporations will face in the beginning of the 21st century. It has been estimated that turnover in the global carbon marketplace could exceed a trillion dollars in the next five to ten years. Voluntary and mandatory reporting protocols are emerging. How can an organization know its true carbon footprint and exposure? What options are available to manage corporate carbon risk? What impact can energy efficiency programs have on reducing a corporation’s carbon footprint? Read whitepaper

OSIsoft’s real-time monitoring solutions help companies improve the overall energy efficiency of their organization while simultaneously reducing its carbon footprint. In fact, Microsoft uses OSIsoft PI infrastructure for their Data Center Energy management. Also at a recent, OSIsoft user group meeting, Kodak presented on how they were able conserve energy and reduce their operational costs by using OSIsoft software.

Several case studies exist on OSIsoft’s website which can be viewed at http://www.osisoft.com/Resources/Case%20Studies

Here, we continue our discussion with some of the developers who make PI. OSISoft's founder and CEO, Dr. Pat Kennedy, starts off this part with some very interesting example of systems that use PI. I bet you wouldn't think ice breaking ships in the Artic would rely on PI...

Cast of characters:

Prabal Acharya, ex-OSIsoft-customer to ex-engineering to now Director, Microsoft Global Alliance
Alex Zheng, Team Lead, PI Server & Analytics
Jason King, Senior Developer, PI Clients
Denis Vacher, Lead Developer, PI Server Core and Niner
Dr. Pat Kennedy – Founder and CEO
Mark Hughes – CTO

See Read whitepaper

Several case studies exist on OSIsoft’s website which can be viewed at http://www.osisoft.com/Resources/Case%20Studies

Here, we meet some of the developers who make PI and a surprise appearance by OSISoft's founder and CEO, Dr. Pat Kennedy. What is PI, exactly? How does it work? Is it extensible?

Cast of characters:

Prabal Acharya, ex-OSIsoft-customer to ex-engineering to now Director, Microsoft Global Alliance.
Alex Zheng, Team Lead, PI Server & Analytics
Jason King, Senior Developer, PI Clients
Denis Vacher, Lead Developer, PI Server Core and Niner
Dr. Pat Kennedy – Founder and CEO
Mark Hughes – CTO

See Nuance Communications Director of OEM Integration chats with us about Nuance’s imaging and speech recognition solutions.

Here, Allan discusses the development & prototyping processes of speech and scanning applications utilizing VS 2005,WPF, SDKs and the joy of coding in various languages. Allan also details some of the learnings that arose around Vista integration with Dragon, a leading dictation application; as well as some of the opportunities they envision from Vista features such as xps and how it will enhance the user experience for document management.

Nuance creates some incredibly innovative technologies. Check this out.

This is part two in a two part series. Here, we talk about the work Nuance developers did to upgrade their applications to run on Windows Vista. See part one