By leveraging Windows Error Reporting (WER), independent software vendors (ISVs) can use Microsoft’s existing infrastructure for providing end users with patches and workarounds, a critical aspect of the application life-cycle management.

Even the best-written C++ applications can crash or hang—and end-users' perceptions of the application hinge on how gracefully the application works with the operating system to handle such problems. By registering your applications with Windows Application Recovery and Restart, they can recover gracefully after errors occur.

Correctly managing the release of heap-allocated memory and other resources has been one of the great challenges of C and C++ development for decades. The new shared_ptr class, shipping with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and Visual Studio 2010, makes dealing with resource management dramatically simpler.

By adopting a messaging based approach to task parallelism, the Asynchronous Agents Library provides a simple model for concurrent programming that avoids the complexity of memory locks.

Visual C++ 2010 includes a number of new features for preventing data inconsistencies due to simultaneous updates of memory locations—a key challenge in parallel development.

Visual C++ 10.0's new Parallel Pattern Library supplies methods to execute multiple processing tasks, across available processing resources, eliminating the headache of manually allocating task execution.

Visual C++ 2010 with many of the new C++ 0x language features including Lambdas. Discover how lambda functions make C++ code easier to read and maintain, and explore the various techniques for writing them ships.

Visual C++ 2010 sees the integration of MSBuild with Visual C++. MSBuild is Microsoft's common build engine and one of its key design goals is the ability to support a high-degree of flexibility in customizing the build process. See how a custom MSBuild task can be built in Visual C++, and how the task can be used to customize the build process of other Visual C++ 2010 projects.

MSBuild is the build platform that Microsoft is using across all developer and related tools moving forward. Visual C++ is the last major compiler offering from Microsoft to move onto the MSBuild platform, with the Visual C++ 2010 release using MSBuild as its native project format. Explore the MSBuild basics from a C++ perspective, and see how it can improve your build process.

C++/CLI has a number of advanced features that make developing and maintaining applications easier. Discover how these allow types to be moved between assemblies without breaking existing application, allow fast and efficient interoperability between native functions, and make it possible to create functions that take a variable number of parameters while still maintaining type safety.

The Visual C++ compiler has a number of switches that control the generation of native and managed instructions within an executable image. Choosing the correct setting is an important consideration for application performance, deployment, and execution, as well as having implications about which development toolkits can be used.

Replacing the cumbersome and confusing Managed Extensions for C++ that shipped with Visual C++ 2002 and 2003, C++/CLI is a standardized set of C++ language extensions that allows developers to write managed code that executes on top of the .NET Framework.

Despite the best documentation, stepping into the actual source code of third-party libraries can be the fastest way to diagnose a difficult bug or determine the state that a component needs to be in before a certain operation can be completed. With a little set-up magic, developers can step into libraries quickly and easily.

Thread debugging can be one of the more difficult debugging exercises for a Visual C++ developer. The Visual Studio 2008 debugger contains a number of improvements that make thread debugging more productive, enabling code issues in multi-threaded applications to be identified and remedied faster.

Effective use of the Visual C++ debugger is one of the easiest ways to increase developer productivity. Program database (PDB) files are one of the key elements in effectively debugging an application, and it is easy to set up Visual Studio to use debug symbols for binary files produced by other developers, including those at Microsoft.

Code is run in a debugger for two main reasons: examining the branches of code that are being executed, and examining data values to determine why the code is behaving in a certain manner. Inspecting data values can be significantly improved by customizing the debug information. See how that can be done in the Visual C++ debugger.

The Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack incorporates C++ language changes that move C++ closer to the upcoming C++0x standard. The new language elements build on the powerful features of the C++ language, and include support for regular expressions, function objects, and a number of new STL containers as well as many other new features. Review some of the new language features, and see how they can be incorporated into C++ applications.

For large and complex applications, dealing with the amount of data collected can be difficult. See how the Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) Developer Edition Profiler can do an excellent job of finding performance problems by simply pointing it at an application and allowing it to collect data.

Applications with great performance are a hallmark of C++ programming, and one of the best tools for achieving great application performance is a code profiler. Take a look at the Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) profiler, and see how it can be used to find code bottlenecks and improve performance.

Learn how to rapidly develop applications and add-ins using ATL for Windows CE.

Drill deeper into Mobile Development in C++ and go through the development and debugging of a Windows Mobile 6 application with a focus on MFC.

Try a no-embedded-background-needed introduction into developing Windows Mobile applications in C++. With comprehensive support for smart device development in Visual C++ and great device emulation features in the Windows Mobile SDKs, mobile development is well within the reach of all Visual C++ developers.

C++0X is coming and with it are new object initialization features and better control over struct/class member alignment.

The release of Visual Studio 2008 brings support for using the Visual Studio Class Designer with Visual C++ projects. Look at the differences in how the Class Designer works with C++ compared to purely managed languages, and learn about the range of functionality available to C++ developers.

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