Microsoft Visual Studio is an IDE suite containing the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler MSVC. MSVC is a popular C/C++ compiler for Windows that in recent years has become at the leading edge of language standard compliance. Due to the four-decade legacy of MSVC and development completely independent of other leading compilers such as GCC and Clang, there are numerous headers and syntax specific to MSVC. A key technique for loading MSVC-specific headers and functions is to check for existence of preprocessor macro _MSC_VER.

#ifdef _MSC_VER
#include <crtdbg.h>
#endif

Some projects that have been developed mostly in non-Windows environments may have overly broad preprocessor checks e.g. #ifdef _WIN32 that can be refined to specifically enable MinGW GCC, Intel oneAPI as well as MSVC on Windows.

2022

• 2022-12-20 – Disable Visual Studio debug model window
• 2022-12-18 – Visual Studio memory leak detection
• 2022-11-24 – CMake and Meson compiler option family
• 2022-09-20 – Visual Studio /delayload with CMake
• 2022-08-04 – NMake external projects from CMake
• 2022-06-09 – Intel oneAPI / Visual Studio debug library build
• 2022-05-10 – Visual-Studio only _set_printf_count_output
• 2022-05-03 – ssize_t for Visual Studio
• 2022-02-17 – CMake shared libraries on Visual Studio / oneAPI

2021

• 2021-11-10 – Python 3 Microsoft Visual C++ 14.0 is required

2020

• 2020-08-07 – Visual Studio 16.7 C11 standard
• 2020-04-23 – CMake missing rc.exe needs Windows SDK
• 2020-03-24 – Visual Studio update Ninja build
• 2020-02-18 – Specify C and CXX for CMake projects with MSVC

2019

• 2019-11-15 – Switch Visual Studio project version