# Thursday, 28 May 2009

Stephan has blogged some breaking changes to the STL in beta 1 of VS 2010. These are breaking in the sense that your old code, which worked, might not work when you move it to the latest release. I had this with a demo (not real code) that didn't bother #including <iterator> because it was including something else that included it etc. So my old code wouldn't build in Dev10. Simple enough fix to add the #include.

That alone (4 simple problems, and how to fix them) makes the post worth reading. But it's also a fantastic example of the transparency and visibility the team blog provides. Look at this sentence:

In VC10 Beta 1, I added operator->() to CAdapt, allowing v[i]->Something() to compile unchanged. 

Not "we added". Not "it was decided to add". Not "some faceless decider, whose motives and reasoning are not accessible to the mere mortals who just read our decisions, added". Simply "I added". Stephan, STL, a real person whose posts we can recognize by font alone, added an operator. I think as C++ developers we are a very lucky lot, to have this kind of window into how and why the tools change as time goes by.

The conversation continues in the comments, btw. On the C++ team blog, if a post interests you, you should always read the comments too. Folks ask stuff and team members (not always those who posted the original) answer.

Kate

Thursday, 28 May 2009 21:33:33 (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)  #