ISO C++ evolving faster than before
The ISO C++ 2011 standard was a very exciting (and on some of its features, controversial) development for the language, up until when it was finalized and approved. There was hope, though not without some skepticism, that the standard would evolve at a faster pace in the future.
Fast forward to May 2013, and what we see is that the standards committee is delivering on their promise: A feature-complete working draft for the upcoming language standard, called by some C++14 (or C++1y by the most cautious) has been written as a result of the Bristol meeting, and published on the official standard C++ site. You can download a copy of the working draft here.
Among the approved new features of this minor standard update are quite a few standard library additions (such as the file system library and the very often requested make_unique), variable templates, generic lambdas and “Concepts Lite”.
A common complaint C++ developers used to have is that compilers also do not adapt quickly enough to the new standard. While it is debatable whether two years is too long a time span for integrating a new standard, the amount of changes between C++98 and C++11 was massive, both on language features and standard library. Most compilers cover, in one way or another, the vast majority of the current standard features.
As of version 4.8.1 (which will officially be released in a matter of weeks), GCC will be C++11 feature complete; the Clang team has recently announced (via twitter) full standard compliance (will be part of a release this summer); and finally, Visual C++ continuously gets updated with further support of the current standard.
Source: www.isocpp.org.
Next BeCPP UG Meeting Planned For June 12th, 2013
The next meeting of the Belgian C++ Users Group is planned for Wednesday June 12th, 2013 at 18:00 at Nikon Metrology HQ.
Nikon Metrology ( http://nikonmetrology.com/ ) is sponsoring this event by providing the location, drinks and catering.
There will be two international speakers:
- Joel Falcou is an assistant professor at the University Paris-Sud and researcher at the Laboratoire de Recherche d’Informatique in Orsay, France. His work focuses on investigating high-level programming models for parallel architectures (present and future) and providing efficient implementation of such models using high-performance language features. He’s an active member of the Boost community and CEO of MetaScale, a French start-up valorizing his research. He is also a member of the ISO C++ Standards Committee.
- Jens Weller is a self-employed C++ specialist, working with C++ for over 14 years. He is organizing the C++ conference “Meeting C++” in Düsseldorf, and also runs http://meetingcpp.com. Jens has some vast C++ experience gathered as a freelancer in the IT Industry.
The agenda is as follows:
- 18:00: Sandwiches.
- 18:30: Session 1: Qt5 – Multimedia Overview (Jens Weller)
The talk will give a short introduction into Qt5, and focus on its Multimedia Framework, showing how to write an MP3 Player or a video recorder in Qt5. - 19:30: Break
- 19:45: Session 2: Boost.Proto (Joel Falcou)
C++ Embedded Domain Specific Languages Made Easy. - 20:45: Guided tour of Nikon Metrology followed by a drink.
Every attendee will receive a discount code for 40% off on the cover-price of any Packt eBook courtesy of Packt Publishing. 
The event is free for everyone, but you need to register for it.
There are 50 seats available for this event.
Note: The deadline for registrations is June 5th, 2013!
Community Day 2013
The Belgian community is organizing the 7th edition of Community Day! Community Day 2013 will take place on June 20th 2013 in Utopolis Mechelen.
14 user groups will outperform themselves to bring you their view on Microsoft products in more than 25 sessions. 2013 is not a release year for Microsoft so far, so that gives us, the community, the opportunity to do deep-dive sessions in interesting topics. The biggest goal of this edition is bringing you high-quality sessions. And we’re pretty sure we have achieved that. Why don’t you take a look yourself at our agenda? Oh and don’t forget to take a look at our sponsor page, because it’s thanks to them we can organize this great event!
Convinced you need to be part of the experience again? Want to register? Great! Registration opens in the second week of May so come back soon to reserve your seat. Remember that last year, the event was sold out very fast, so make sure you’re on time!
The Microsoft Community Day 2013 is powered by:
- AZUG
- Belgian C++ user group
- BIWUG
- CLUG
- Pro-Exchange
- SCUG
- SQLUG
- ACCB.net/VBIB
- Visug
- WinSec
- WinTalks
- DotNetHub
- MADN
- TechNine
We hope to see you on June 20th!
Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 Now Available
Microsoft has released Update 2 for Visual Studio 2012 (VS2012.2). You can get it here.
Just as with VS2012.1 (which is installed as part of VS2012.2 for those of you who don’t already have VS2012.1 installed), this release contains important fixes as well as a wealth of new functionality, addressing feedback we’ve received from the community and aligning with key software development trends in the market. The new functionality primarily spans (though is not limited to) five areas of investment: agile planning, quality enablement, Windows Store development, line-of-business development, and the general developer experience.
Check out Somasegar’s blog post for more details on this update.
CppDepend Now Free for C/C++ Open Source Project Contributors
To thank the open source community for their big efforts in delivering useful applications and libraries for free, CppDepend has been made free for C/C++ open source project contributors.
This is a Pro license which allows you to:
- Improve the code base quality.
- Help new contributors to understand the existing code base.
- Automate the code review to be sure that all the coding rules specified by the manager are satisfied.
- Generate custom reports for documentation purpose.
Meeting C++ 2013 Announcement
After last years great success, there will be a Meeting C++ 2013 with 2 days full of C++ in Germany this Fall. Meeting C++ 2013 will be again at the 2nd weekend of November (8/9.11.2013). This time the conference will take place at the Lindner Congresshotel in Düsseldorf. For this year there will be 25 talks and up to 2 keynotes for the 250 attendees at the conference!
Like last year, this event is organized independently, covering most its costs over the ticket price. There will be 3 tracks about C++ this year, with the 3rd track being a theme track about C++ and UI. Talks about Qt5, XAML, wxWidgets, GTK, Apps and QML could take place in this theme track. The other two tracks will offer general C++ talks like last year. Meeting C++ 2013 is looking again for sponsors, with sponsors from last year already being contacted.
The call for papers for Meeting C++ 2013 has started and will end on May 15th. The process will be a bit different then last years. Talks will be collected, and then anonymously rated by a Program Committee consisting out of community members, organizers and sponsors. All ratings will be combined and used to do the final placement in the schedule. Speakers will have the opportunity to publish an entry about their talk at our blog this year! Tickets will be available soon, starting with the early bird ticket sale. This year there will be 250 tickets available for the conference, early bird tickets will cost €399, normal tickets €499. Early bird tickets will be sold till the end of June, after the schedule is available for one month, or till the 100 available tickets are sold out.
Superhackathon in Belgium
Microsoft is organizing a Superhackathon in Belgium on 27th of March. Starting at 9AM for the Day part, and continuing until midnight for the Night part. This is a hackathon organized simultaneously in Brussels, Genk, Mons, and Kortijk.
Code, build, eat, drink & win.
Experts will be on site to help you with the last phase of building your first Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8 application. The event will be streaming live everywhere to the world.
There will be experts (many!), breakfast, pizza, coffee (lots!) and Red Bull. You can win prizes and rewards such as tickets to TechEd, Asus Vivo Tab, Lumia Phone and more.
BeCPP Dinner with Tarek Madkour (March 6, 2013 )
The next BeCPP event is a dinner with Tarek Madkour. Tarek Madkour is Group Program Manager for the Visual C++ team at Microsoft. Tarek’s team is responsible for delivering the compilers, libraries, runtimes and IDE that enable developers to create great native applications on the Microsoft platforms. Tarek is a tool maker by passion and trade. Ever since joining Microsoft a little over a decade ago, he spent all his time working on the various aspects of native development tools.
This is your chance to speak directly with a program manager from the Microsoft Visual C++ development team. Tarek likes questions/feedback/comments, so bring a lot of them 
The dinner is planned for Wednesday March 6th 2013 at 20:00 in Antwerp; most probably the Burgerij near the MAS ( http://www.burgerij.be/mas.php ). However, the exact location depends on the number of people coming, but it will be in Antwerp for sure.
At this moment we don’t know yet whether the dinner will be sponsored or not, but even if we don’t get sponsoring, that shouldn’t be a show-stopper I hope.
Only a limited number of seats are available. Register here.
Note: The deadline for registrations is February 27!
Slides of the 4th of February 2013 BeCPP Meeting
The Belgian C++ Users Group meeting on 4th of February 2013 was a great success. There were around 50 attendees. Thank you everyone for joining us. We would also like to thank Materialise for sponsoring the event by providing the location and catering.
We received some feedback on our survey, and there were some complaints about the fact that there wasn’t a clear schedule for the evening. We really appreciate and listen to the feedback. So, next event will have a clear schedule which will be announced on the blog and on the event invitations, and we will stick to the announced schedule on the day of the event.
If you couldn’t attend the event in person, or if you would like to go over the slides again, you can download them below.
Presentation: “Effective WinRT with C++” by Francisco Almeida
Presentation: “Threading in C++11″ by Lieven de Cock
This presentation comes with an archive with all example code shown during the presentation. You can download this archive here.
Presentation: “How much testing is enough – Coverity” by Ian Ashworth
I hope to see you all on future BeCPP events.