Most op you will know by now that the Visual Studio 11 Beta UI is rather gray. There was a lot of feedback about this from the communities, and it seems Microsoft is listening. They have announced a couple of UI changes to bring back some color to the UI.
Check out this blog post for a description of the changes, including before and after screenshots. I definitely like the new upcoming changes 🙂
A while ago, I’ve posted the following posts on this blog:
Those articles were written using the Visual C++ 11 Developer Preview.
Starting with Visual C++ 11 Beta, there will be a few small changes to the C++ AMP specification compared to the C++ AMP in the Visual C++ 11 Developer Preview. Tamer Afify from the C++ AMP team explains it as follows in his blog post:
“In the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview, C++ AMP had a grid class that was basically an extent, plus an index object representing an origin. In the Beta we have removed grid from the programming model and instead you simply use an extent. Also the tiled_grid class was removed and a tiled_extent class is introduced with the same functionality that tiled_grid provided.”
Every API that returned or accepted a grid or tiled_grid now returns or accepts an extent or tiled_extent. Most C++ AMP code can be modified with a simple find and replace operation. The find and replace operation is a bit more complicated if you have set the origin parameter of your grid to something other than the default zero index object. Check Tamer Afify blog post for more details.
Once the Visual C++ 11 Beta has been released, I will write an update for my above presentation slides and my Mandelbrot implementation.
As promised, Microsoft has released an open specification of C++ AMP: Accelerated Massive Parallelism 🙂
This allows other compiler vendors to implement support for C++ AMP on any platform.
Read the official announcement.
Here are the slides of my presentation on C++ AMP that I gave to software engineers at my company.
It is time to start taking advantage of the computing power of GPUs…
A while ago I wrote an article about how to use the Microsoft Parallel Patterns Library (PPL) to render the Mandelbrot fractal using multiple CPU cores. That article can be found here.
This new article will make the Mandelbrot renderer multiple times faster by using a new Microsoft technology called C++ AMP: Accelerated Massive Parallelism, introduced in the Visual C++ 11 Preview.
By now, virtually everyone on this planet heart about the Windows 8 Developer Preview that was launched a couple of days ago on the Microsoft BUILD conference.
Everyone can download this developer preview. This will give you the opportunity to play and experiment with the new Metro layout for Windows.
The developer preview also includes a preview of Microsoft Visual Studio 11 express edition, which makes it very easy to make Metro style applications in C++, C#, VB.Net, or JavaScript.
Any serious developer should download this preview and learn as much as possible about the new Windows platform.
Go to the BUILD website to download the preview and to download interesting video recordings of the sessions on the BUILD conference.
Marc Gregoire
marc.gregoire@nuonsoft.com
Software Project Manager
Software Architect
Scrum Master
Microsoft MVP VC++
Founder of the Belgian C++ Users Group (BeCPP).
