C++ as a language has been declining in use over recent years and becoming more of a specialist language, to the point where it is now commonly seen as the language for writing operating systems, device drivers, games engines, and those rare applications when speed is of the essence.

This decline hasn’t been helped by the slow pace of improvements in the C++ language and the volume of code needed when compared to more modern languages. However the introduction of Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 sees a chance for the decline to stop. Microsoft has recognized that C++ developers are still a viable and valuable part of the developer ecosystem and that it’s about time they got some love. C++ developers will be pleased with the support for C++ 11; the inclusion of reference counting smart pointers alone will make memory management much simpler. They will also be pleased with the tooling improvements Visual Studio 2012 offers and this is what we’ll be looking at in the recipes in this chapter.

So without any further ado, let’s get to it.