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Visual C Plus Plus

Visual C++
Visual C++ Icon.png
Developer(s) Microsoft
Initial release February 1993; 24 years ago (1993-02)
Stable release
2017 / March 7, 2017; 4 months ago (2017-03-07)
Written in C++
Operating system Windows
Platform IA-32, x86-64 and Itanium 2
Available in English, Chinese, French, Japanese, Korean, German, and likely others
Type IDE
License Trialware and freeware
Website msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/60k1461a.aspx

Microsoft Visual C++ (often abbreviated to MSVC) is an integrated development environment (IDE) product from Microsoft for the C, C++, and C++/CLI programming languages. MSVC is proprietary software; it was originally a standalone product but later became a part of Visual Studio and made available in both trialware and freeware forms. It features tools for developing and debugging C++ code, especially code written for Windows API, DirectX and .NET Framework.

Many applications require redistributable Visual C++ packages to function correctly. These packages are often installed independently of applications, allowing multiple applications to make use of the package while only having to install it once. These Visual C++ redistributable and runtime packages are mostly installed for standard libraries that many applications use.

The predecessor to Visual C++ was called Microsoft C/C++. There was also a Microsoft QuickC 2.5 and a Microsoft QuickC for Windows 1.0. The Visual C++ compiler is still known as Microsoft C/C++ and as of the release of Visual C++ 2015 Update 2, is on version 19.00.23918.

The predefined macro _MSC_VER indicates the major and minor version numbers of the Visual C++ compiler. The macro's value is an integer literal in which the last two digits indicate the minor version number and the preceding digits indicate the major version number.


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