Visual Studio boosts C++ development

Microsoft has rolled out improvements for C++ development in the latest version of the Visual Studio IDE, including enhancements for the standard library and significantly faster breakpoint performance.

The release, Visual Studio 2022 v17.11, was unveiled August 13. The company has followed that release with two blog posts pertaining to C++ support in the IDE, one on August 21 and another on August 13.

For the standard library, the main areas of improvements are in formatted output, diagnostics, and vectorization. With formatted output, Microsoft has implemented parts of formatting ranges and all of printing blank lines with println. The vectorization improvements cover more than a dozen standard algorithms. And diagnostics improvements have been made to common misuses of std::ranges::to and std::get(std::tuple).

Visual Studio now delivers enhanced performance for conditional breakpoints in C++ through a reworked implementation. With Visual Studio v17.11, an initial assessment finds execution time is nearly four times as fast, reducing execution time from 80 seconds to 21 seconds over 80,000 iterations. For the core editor, developers now can narrow the scope of code searches with newly added scoping options.

Also with Visual Studio v17.11, Microsoft has added support for the CMake debugger in CMake projects that target Linux via Windows Subsystem for Linux or SSH. The CMake debugger allows debugging of CMake scripts and CMakeLists.txt files through the Visual Studio debugger.

Microsoft also said it has made it easier to view GitHub and Azure Devops pull request comments directly in a working file in Visual Studio. Developers now can stay in context, make code changes, and interact with colleagues’ suggestions without switching contexts in the browser.

Elsewhere in the IDE, “quality of life” changes have been added to C++ Build Insights integration. Developers now can filter Build Insights trace results by project.