Porting C++ Applications to Visual Studio 2010

[This blog entry was updated on 4/12/2010 to reflect the final release of Visual Studio 2010.]

I've now spent a couple of days porting my C++ applications to VS2010. Here are the top ten things I've learned.

1. STL
If your app makes significant use of STL, prepare to spend some time making it work in VS2010. The new version of STL has been significantly reworked to take advantage of rvalue references and static asserts. I spent several hours reworking some of my derived classes to update the supported operators.

2. Boost
Make sure you get version 1.42 of Boost, which includes support for VS2010. Thankfully, Boost 1.42 has not yet been updated with C++0x features, so porting was relatively straightforward.

3. Property Manager
Earlier versions of Visual Studio used the Property Manager to manage certain settings like optimization and DLL usage. Visual Studio 2010 dramatically expands the use of the Property Manager. If you created your own pages in the property manager in an existing project, you'll find that VS2010 migrates the information to .props files instead of .vsprops. The files use different formats, although they are both XML. Don't forget to check these new files into source control. I had trouble with parameters that were lost when the project was migrated, including Additional Include Directories, Additional Libraries, and Delay Load Libraries. Make sure you compare your VS2005 or VS2008 property pages with the equivalent pages in VS2010.

4. Target Name
VS2010 introduces a new "Target Name" property in the General page of Configuration Properties. I still haven't figured out the rationale, but you need to make sure your Target Name matches the Output File in the Linker or Library pages. (Note that Target Name should not have the extension included.) One symptom of this happening is that you try to run your application and the application is not found, even after building correctly.

5. Default Directories
For the last several releases, the default Include and Library search paths were found under Tools/Options. Now they are on the General page of the project Properties, under "VC++ Directories." This is all managed from the Property Manager, so you can override the default directories for a single solution by replacing Microsoft.Cpp.Win32.User (or Microsoft.Cpp.x64.User) with your own custom page. This is a big win over earlier versions of Visual Studio, where the default directories were a global setting that couldn't be overridden.

6. Platform Toolset
You can use the Visual Studio 2008 compiler/linker under the VS2010 IDE, which allows you to get the improved user experience without having to port your code. However, if you are still stuck on VS2003 or VS2005, this won't help you.

7. Target CLR Version
It's possible to target versions of the CLR other than 4.0, but you can't do it from the IDE. See my related blog post for instructions.

8. Show Inactive Code Blocks
The editor is now much more successful at detecting Inactive Code Blocks. Historically this has been a problem because commands such as "Go to declaration" don't work in an Inactive Code Block.

9. MFC Application Size
The size of all of my MFC-based applications (statically linked) has grown by about 1.5MB. I'm not very happy about this. I double-checked all of my build settings and they are correct. A similar question on the Visual C++ Team Blog was given the answer that "The increased capabilities of MFC have introduced a number of additional interdependencies that end up causing more of MFC to be pulled in when linking a minimal application that links with the static MFC libraries." So this problem may not be solvable.

10. Intellitrace
IntelliTrace is the "historical debugging" tool that records the guts of your application as it runs. Unfortunately, IntelliTrace doesn't work for C++. Bummer. It also requires the Visual Studio Ultimate, which isn't available to Microsoft Partners. Double bummer.

11. Range-based "for" loops
One of the features I was particularly looking forward to was support for a compiler-based "foreach" syntax, which made it much simpler to write loops based on STL containers. Unfortunately, Visual Studio 2010 doesn't include this feature because the committee standardized is too late in the Visual Studio beta process. More information can be found in the comments section from this blog entry on the Visual C++ Team Blog.