I’ve blogged about Casablanca before. Here’s a related talk from TechEd Australia:

Casablanca is a Microsoft incubation effort to support cloud-based client-server communication in native code using a modern asynchronous C++ API design. Think of it as Node.js, but using C++ – from simple services, to JSON and REST, to Azure storage and deployment, and more.

Casablanca gives you the power to use existing native C++ libraries and code to do awesome things on the cloud server. In this talk from TechEd Australia, John Azariah and Mahesh Krishnan show how it’s done.

The second panel from C++ and Beyond 2012 is now available on Channel 9:

Alexandrescu, Meyers and Sutter – Ask Us Anything

Here is the “Ask Us Anything” panel from C++ and Beyond 2012.

Andrei Alexandrescu, Scott Meyers and Herb Sutter take questions from attendees. As expected, great questions and answers…

Table of contents (click the time codes ([xx:xx]) to hear the answers…):

• message passing primitives in future versions of the standard… [00:00]
• standardized unit testing framework… [02:55]
• std::async… [04:30]
• standard modules proposal… [08:14]
• keyword additions and the standard library… [09:35]
• problems (and solutions) with exceptions… [12:50]
• future of concepts… [22:34]
• std::thread and thread interruption… [23:03]
• when to use the auto keyword (and when not to…)… [25:03]
• more on auto (benefits of reduncancy, type conversion issues with bool to int?)… [29:31]
• const and multithreaded programming, in C++11 const means thread safe, too… [35:00]
• yet more on auto (impact on rampant use and code readability/comprehension)… [42:42]
• compiler type deduction information (compiler switch that prints out auto deduced type information)… [50:18]
• printing out code for review that replaces auto with the actual type… [53:30]
• auto and dynamic memory allocation… [54:59]
• useful, broadly-used concurrency libraries… [57:00]

Today Microsoft released another free Express version of Visual C++ 2012. In addition to the free Express Visual C++ compiler for building tablet applications, Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop directly supports traditional Windows and command-line applications in C++.

This a great free C++ compiler on Windows for everything from hobby development to using and contributing to open source projects. Besides additional C++11 standards conformance with range-for, override and final on the language side (with more to come in the coming months; watch this space) and a complete C++11 standard library implementation, the free compiler also includes unit testing framework for C++, code analysis for C++ (try /analyze today if you haven’t already, as John Carmack says so well), C++ AMP for GPGPU programming, and much more.

See also the longer announcement here.