Entries tagged with c++ - Channel 9

MFC: Integrating your application with the Windows Restart Manager

Charles — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:37:00 GMT

This is a short demonstration of new MFC features in MFC which help with integrating your application with the Windows Restart Manager. This is done by implementing handlers for restart and crash recovery, and by integrating an auto-save feature that uses the document-view architecture to save intermediate temporary copies of your document. This is implemented in an application generated by the MFC application wizard. Pat Brenner, MFC guru and one of the folks who design and implement MFC is your host.

Check out Pat's screencast tutorial on implementing handlers for preview, thumbnail and search filtering

MFC: Implementing handlers for preview, thumbnail and search filtering

Charles — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:37:00 GMT

This is a short demonstration of new MFC features in MFC and ATL which help with integrating your application’s file type into Windows Explorer. This is done by implementing handlers for preview, thumbnail and search filtering, all of which are implemented in an application generated by the MFC application wizard. Pat Brenner, MFC guru and one of the folks who design and implement MFC is your host.

Pat Brenner: Visual Studio 2010 - MFC and Windows 7

Charles — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:54:00 GMT

Microsoft Foundation Classes for C++ (MFC) continue to evolve and will ship with Visual Studio 2010. In fact, you can start playing with the updated and improved MFC right now by downloading the VS 2010 Beta 2.

MFC wraps native Windows APIs in convenient C++ wrapper classes that are defined for many Windows objects and common window controls. Not surprisingly, MFC wraps some of the new capabilities in Windows 7 (and will continue to do so in the future).

Some of the key MFC updates in VS 2010 Beta 2 are:

Improved interaction with Windows Explorer (Watch this Screencast for Demo):

Windows7 taskbar interaction with preview
Preview, thumbnail and search filter handlers for file types

Ribbon UI improvements:

Ribbon is now an XML resource in the application
A new designer for the ribbon
Visual manager for Windows7 ribbon style

Restart manager support (Watch this Screencast for demo):

Application restart or crash handled more elegantly
Document auto-save and restore handled completely within MFC (if wanted)

Software Developer and 20 year Microsoft veteran Pat Brenner sits down with us to discuss the new and improved MFC and how it takes advantage of new Windows 7 features in the typically convenient MFC way.

Enjoy!

Stephan T. Lavavej: Everything you ever wanted to know about nullptr

Charles — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:39:00 GMT

In C++, 0 is an abused integer. It is used to reflect, well, 0 as a value of type int and it is also used to represent a null pointer... The latter has led to many bugs and confusion over the past 30 years. Put simply, using 0 is and has always been a bad idea (then there's the NULL macro...). Well, my friends, today, with the release of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and the updated C++ language, compilers and libraries that come with it, the abuse of 0 comes to an end: Introducing nullptr the rvalue constant that actually is a null pointer literal.

Who better to dig deep into nullptr (and a few other topics of related interest and importance) than the great and gifted Stephan T. Lavavej? Stephen is a C++ expert and library author who you've met before a few times on C9. Sit back, relax and learn everything you ever wanted to know about nullptr. Thank you, Stephen, for the awesome lesson!

Enjoy!

VC Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/default.aspx

Inside the Active Template Library (ATL) Security Update

Charles — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 17:02:00 GMT

Today, Microsoft announced the details of an out-of-band security update that impacts ATL components and controls (like ActiveX controls, for example) -> Developers who have built controls using vulnerable versions of ATL should take immediate action to review and identify any vulnerabilities, modify and recompile their affected controls and components using the updated versions of ATL and finally distribute a non-vulnerable version of the controls and components to their customers.

Here, Damien Watkins from the VC++ team and Damian Hasse and Jonathan Ness from MSRC Engineering review the steps to identify and address vulnerable controls and components. Of course, being a Channel 9 interview, we dig into various aspects of the problem without veering away from the goal here: helping you understand the exact issues with this vulnerability. If you own a component or control that uses ATL, then you will know what you need to do to prevent a possible attack.

Please visit the URLs below as soon as possible for detailed information on this vulnerability.

Resources discussed in this video are available on MSDN: Active Template Library Security Update and Developers

Detailed technical information on this security release for ATL developers: http://blogs.technet.com/srd/archive/2009/07/28/overview-of-the-out-of-band-release.aspx

Additional information on this security release is available on the Security Research & Defense blog

Overview with background + table of links: http://blogs.technet.com/srd/archive/2009/07/28/overview-of-the-out-of-band-release.aspx

IE mitigation explanation: http://blogs.technet.com/srd/archive/2009/07/28/internet-explorer-mitigations-for-atl-data-stream-vulnerabilities.aspx

Deep dive for developers: http://blogs.technet.com/srd/archive/2009/07/28/atl-vulnerability-developer-deep-dive.aspx

How msvidctl.dll is related: http://blogs.technet.com/srd/archive/2009/07/28/msvidctl-ms09-032-and-the-atl-vulnerability.aspx

Michael Howard's perspective on this issue: http://blogs.msdn.com/sdl/archive/2009/07/28/atl-ms09-035-and-the-sdl.aspx

Lambda Expressions in C++

Kathleen McGrath — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 20:03:00 GMT

In this interview, programming writer Thomas Petchel demonstrates how to use Lambda Expressions in C++. You can also learn more in the topic: Lambda Expressions in C++.

Kathleen McGrath
Visual Studio User Education
http://blogs.msdn.com/kathleen

The C++ Concurrency Runtime - Asynchronous Agents Library

Phil Pennington — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 03:55:00 GMT

The Asynchronous Agents Library (or just Agents Library) provides a programming model that enables you to increase the robustness of concurrency-enabled application development. The Agents Library is a C++ template library that promotes an actor-based programming model and in-process message passing for fine-grained dataflow and pipelining tasks. The Agents Library builds upon the scheduling and resource management components of the Concurrency Runtime.

The agent class itself is intended for course grained parallelism/components that handle larger computationally intensive tasks or collections of smaller tasks. Fundamentally, agents are tasks that have an observable lifecycle and communicate with other agents by using message passing. Agents are NOT intended to be used for fine-grained parallelism; for that, the patterns and constructs in the Parallel Patterns Library are better suited.

You'll want to subscribe to the Native Concurrency blog, find more resource and download example code from Code Gallery.

The C++ Concurrency Runtime - Parallel Patterns Library

Phil Pennington — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 03:55:00 GMT

The C++ Concurrency Runtime is new with Visual Studio 2010 and currently in beta. The runtime encapsulates and extends many new operating system features including NUMA resource locality and User-Mode-Scheduling.

The Parallel Patterns Library (PPL) provides an imperative programming model that promotes scalability and ease-of-use for developing concurrent applications. The PPL raises the level of abstraction between your application code and the underlying thread/task scheduling mechanisms by providing generic, type-safe algorithms and containers that act on data in parallel. The PPL also enables you to develop applications that scale by providing alternatives to shared state.

The PPL provides the following features:

Task Parallelism: a mechanism to execute several work items (tasks) in parallel.
Parallel algorithms: generic algorithms that act on collections of data in parallel.
Parallel containers and objects: generic container types that provide safe concurrent access to their elements.

By using PPL, you can introduce fine-grained parallelism without even having to manage a scheduler. You would use the Asynchronous Agents Library instead to express coarse-grained parallelism.

You'll want to subscribe to the Native Concurrency blog, find more resource and download example code from Code Gallery.

Expert to Expert: Erik Meijer and Michael Isard - Inside Dryad

Charles — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:55:00 GMT

Microsoft Research recently announced the availability, under Academic Licensing, of Dryad, an infrastructure which allows a programmer to use the resources of a computer cluster or a data center for running data-parallel programs.

A Dryad programmer can use thousands of machines, each of them with multiple processors or cores, without knowing anything about concurrent programming.

That's a pretty heady statement. What does Dryad do, exactly, to enable this level of abstraction, shielding programmers from the incredibly complex world of distributed parallel computing? Does the level of abstraction impact the degree to which sophisticated programmers can interact with and control some of the low level mechanisms of the Dryad runtime? What is it about LINQ that made it the no-brainer managed programming abstraction for Dryad?

Simply, how does Dryad work? This is the core question that Erik and I had after our conversation with Roger Barga (part one of this E2E mini-series on Dryad and DryadLINQ - perhaps we should focus just on DryadLINQ next time, but for now, all the information in this conversation is certain to keep you very busy and answer many questions you may have after learning about Dryad in part one...).

Lots of whiteboarding here. Put on your thinking caps!

Enjoy.

Bogdan Mihalcea: The New VC++ Project/Build system - MSBuild for C++

Charles — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:32:00 GMT

Bogdan Mihalcea is a developer on the VC++ build and project system team. He and team have been very busy rewriting the VC++ build system in order to take advantage of MSBuild, which is Visual Studio's build system. MSBuild is completely transparent with regards to how it processes and builds software, enabling developers to orchestrate and build products in build lab environments where Visual Studio is not installed.

In the past, the capability to reason about the build process at very granular levels has been challenging for large C++ projects. With VS 2010, VC++ will ship with an updated project/build system that, like all other .NET languages that ship with VS have had since the advent of MSBuild, will take advantage of the power, flexibility and extensibility of Visual Studio's build system. Tune in. Bogdan explains what this all means and draws plenty of useful diagrams on the whiteboard to aid your understanding. This is very good news for C++ developer who wanting more control over the flow of the building process. Right on!

Here's a great blog post on some of the details: http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2008/11/20/printf-hello-msbuild-n.aspx

David LeBlanc: Inside SafeInt

Charles — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:34:00 GMT

SafeInt is a C++ header containing the SafeInt class, non-throwing functions to check common operations, and the associated internal mechanisms. SafeInt is currently used extensively throughout Microsoft, with substantial adoption within Office and Windows.

David LeBlanc is a software engineer and security expert. You may know him from the Writing Secure Code books. David and Michael Howard have helped raise the bar for software security inside Microsoft for several years now. David has mostly remained out of the limelight since he's much more interested in writing secure code than talking about writing secure code. Well, now David's going to be famous. Sorry, David. :)

The great Ale Contenti joins us in this conversation to provide some context and ask some hard questions. Ale is a dev lead on the C++ libraries team. You've seen him a few times on 9. As you can imagine, he probably uses SafeInt in his own work.

Here, we dig into the thinking behind SafeInt, how it works, how it's composed, when to use it, when not to use it and how it will evolve to meet new demands and support other compilers (SafeInt now supports gcc). Enjoy!

C++ MFC Feature Pack

Daniel Garzon — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:56:00 GMT

Rafael Ontivero, MVP de C++, nos da unos ejemplos usando el C++ MFC Feature pack.

Crear una aplicación usando el Ribbon de Office y otra con el de Visual Studio… ver su estructura, código y cómo funciona.

Louis Lafreniere: Next Generation Buffer Overrun Protection with /GS++

Charles — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:34:00 GMT

From the C++ Team Blog: A lot of code written in C and C++ has vulnerabilities that leave their users open to buffer overrun attacks. There are two major reasons for this. One reason is that the languages provide unfettered access to the vulnerable memory; the other reason is that developers make mistakes. The simple fact is that even following the best practices and performing quality checks, by the end of the day, no developers can get 100 percent of their code right all the time. Thus, additional built-in layers of defense to help track down vulnerable areas of code are in order. The Visual C++ compiler’s GS switch, which is on by default, is one of the built-in defenses designed to mitigate the buffer overrun attacks.

With VC 10, the next iteration of VC that ships with Visual Studio 2010, Louis Lafreniere and team have delivered the next iteration of /GS, /GS++. /GS proved to be invaluable for C++ developers wanting compile time checking for buffer overrun vulnerabilities in their code. specifically targetting string buffers. Well, turns out that certain structs proved to be a suitable exploit and /GS did not check data structures like structs. Louis et al, with /GS++, now check for certain typed of struct vulnerability (stack allocated).

Here, Principal Developer Louis Lafreniere takes us through the history and future of /GS, in a deep way, of course. Most of the time is spent at the whiteboard mapping out exactly how /GS works and what to expect from /GS++.

Enjoy!

VC 10: Stephan T. Lavavej and Damien Watkins - Inside STL

Charles — Thu, 21 May 2009 15:43:00 GMT

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 introduces a number of exciting new features for the C++ developer as we include a selection of goodies from the upcoming C++0x Standard. We have already heard about many of the language improvements (auto, decltype, lambdas, rvalue references, …) all of which can be put to good use when using the Standard Template Library (STL). Here, Visual C++ team members who work on the STL – Stephan (Dev), Damien (PM) and a cameo appearance by Usman (QA) – Usman works in our Canadian Development Center and unfortunately could not be onsite for the video - tell us all about the latest version of STL. We talk about how the language features are enabling many improvements to the STL, with performance being a big beneficiary. To realize these benefits we needed to update our STL implementation to leverage these new techniques, for example adding “move” semantics to STL containers. Additionally when users of our STL implementation add “move” semantics to their types that they store in our STL containers then we hook into these as well.

Learn more:

http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2009/04/22/decltype-c-0x-features-in-vc10-part-3.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2009/02/03/rvalue-references-c-0x-features-in-vc10-part-2.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2008/10/28/lambdas-auto-and-static-assert-c-0x-features-in-vc10-part-1.aspx

We did also mention lambdas, decltype, auto (and C++0x, generally) in a C9 PCP video from a while back:

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Parallel-Computing-in-Native-Code-New-Trends-and-Old-Friends/

Concurrency and Parallelism: Native (C/C++) and Managed (.NET) Perspectives

Charles — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:24:00 GMT

Parallel Computing Platform team members Stephen Toub, Rick Molloy, Don McCrady and Dana Groff join me for a chat about the differences and similarities in their conceptual approach to designing and building concurrent programming abstractions targeting .NET developers and native (C/C++) developers.

Besides the obvious semantic (and runtime) differences between purely managed (.NET) and native code (C/C++), how does the Parallel Computing Platform team develop technologies for each domain and how are these technologies different? Surely, system level developers need system level tooling support that can improve their experience with writing native code that can effectively (and safely) scale to 8 cores (and that's nothing. How many cores will be the norm in 5-8 years? Mostly likely significantly more than 8....). There’s no PLINQ for C++, for example. That said, the fundamental problems the Parallel Computing Platform team are trying to solve span languages and runtimes, but are the differences only in implementation details and programming abstractions? What's the same? What's different? How? Why?

This is another great conversation with some of the folks designing and building technologies that will ultimately, in one form or another, converge into tools (or components of tools) that will help software developers effectively, efficiently and reliably compose applications and services in a Many Core world.

Enjoy!

Parallel Computing in Native Code: New Trends and Old Friends

Charles — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 19:48:00 GMT

We've covered a lot of ground on both C++ and Parallel Computing on Channel 9 over the past few years. For C++ in particular, we've gone deep on many fronts with some of the main players in Microsoft's native programming world. Damien Watkins is one of these players and he's the brains behind most of the interviews you've seen on C9 (he thought them up and set them up). But who is Damien and what does he do?

Rick Molloy (PM) and Don McCrady(Development Lead) have been on Channel 9 before and they are both members of the native side of the parallel computing platform (PCP) house. It's no surprise that most teams who ship Microsoft software work closely with the C++ team given that most of our products are written in native code. The C++ team produces the de facto compiler that most teams at MS use. The PCP team is no exception.

We figured it would be fun to get a C++ player (Damien is a PM on the front-end native compiler team) and some Parallel People together in a room to discuss the native side of the Concurrency Problem (and possible solutions) and get a feel for the synergy between teams. The next version of C++, C++0x, will undoubtedly contain new language constructs that will make it easier to program many-core algorithms. We dig into some of these here as well as reveal for the first time on C9 some new members of the C++ language that you may not have heard about yet....

Enjoy. This is a great conversation among key thinkers who live in and innovate the native world.

Windows Web Services

Yochay Kiriaty — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 22:41:00 GMT

With Windows Web Services, you can create applications that communicate easily with a local computer or a remote Web service. Windows Web Services is a native-code implementation of SOAP and provides core network communication by supporting a broad set of the Web services (WS) family of protocols. Windows Web Services is a peer to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF – managed-code Web services), and provides a high-performance subset of WCF functionality.

Watch Yochay Kiriaty, Windows 7 Technical Evangelist, and Windows Web Services API PM Nikola Dudar as we explain the Windows native Web Services APIs, and why Microsoft created a new set of Web Services APIs when we have WCF. For more technical content on Windows 7 and few cool code samples, go to the Windows 7 Blog for Developers.

You can always watch the Windows 7: Web Services in Native Code PDC session in case you missed the live session

Windows Scenic Animation Overview

Yochay Kiriaty — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 17:28:00 GMT

Smooth animations are fundamental to many graphical UI applications, and Windows 7 introduces a native animation framework for managing the scheduling and execution of animations. The animation framework supplies a library of useful mathematical functions for specifying behavior over time and also lets developers provide their own behavior functions. The framework supports sophisticated resolution of conflicts when multiple animations attempt to manipulate the same value simultaneously. An application can specify that one animation must be completed before another can begin and can force completion within a set time. The new framework also helps animations determine appropriate durations

Watch Yochay Kiriaty, Windows 7 Technical Evangelist, and Windows Ribbon Scenic Animation product team members Paul Kwiatkowski and Paul Gildea as we explain Windows Scenic Animation, why we need it, and which components of Windows use this amazing technology. Paul also has few cool demos that show the real power of this technology.

For more technical content on Windows 7 and few cool code samples, go to the Windows 7 Blog for Developers.

Visual C++ 10: 10 is the new 6

Jason Olson — 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

Jason Olson — 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 Parys — 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

Beth Massi — 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!