Off to California

Developing for Windows 7

The Windows® 7 operating system empowers ISVs to deliver innovative solutions that provide compelling application experiences.   This session introduces Windows 7 and highlights key advances for developers including the new taskbar, jump lists, libraries, Federated Search and the Windows Ribbon.

Compiler Improvements in VS 2010

The C++ compiler in VS2010 supports a number of new features, on the front-end these include C++0x features such as the repurposing of the auto keyword and the additional of new keywords/functionality such as  decltype, lambda functions, rvalue references and static_assert. In addition, we’ve improved the compiler backend and linker to run faster and generate better machine code.  We more efficiently leverage instructions such as cmov, use XMM registers for faster memcpy and improved code generation for some key scenarios, such as SIMD intrinsics programming. There are also security enhancements to the /GS switch.

Concurrency for C++ Developers

Over the last 30 years, the software industry has relied on exponential growth in processor power in order to improve performance, increase functionality, and enhance user experiences. Unfortunately, this “free lunch” is over. Instead of increasing the clock speed of processors, the hardware industry is shifting to multi-core and manycore processors. However, most software today typically is written to utilize only a single core and will not take advantage of most that this new hardware has to offer. The key to high-performance applications of the future is parallelism. This session explores new building blocks in Visual C++ 10 for creating responsive C++ programs that take full advantage of this new hardware. As part of this, we examine new programming models for parallelism and concurrency, including the Parallel Pattern Library (PPL) and the new asynchronous agents APIs, as well as the new Concurrency Runtime (ConcRT), which enables efficient execution of parallel applications. In addition, this session examines new Visual Studio tools to assist in the debugging of parallel applications as well as new profiling support for tuning parallelized applications in order to maximize performance.