The Qt Company has updated its Qt Visual Studio Tools extension for C++ development in Microsoft's flagship IDE, offering a new beta version compatible with Visual Studio 2017.

Microsoft has eased some licensing requirements for Visual Studio Build Tools (VSBT), which comprises a standalone MSVC compiler, libraries and scripts for C++.

A CPP file contains C++ programming code you must compile before you can run the file's code on your Windows system. You use Visual Studio to compile the CPP code on Windows.

Visual Studio gives C++ developers a productivity boost, plus better debugging for Blazor WebAssembly offline apps.

Microsoft launched Visual Studio Online public preview, which meshes together Visual Studio, cloud-hosted developer environments, and a web-based editor.

Xamarin is furthering its mission to make C# the mobile-development language of choice by allowing iOS coders to use Microsoft's Visual Studio.

Microsoft said its compiler and standard library are feature-complete for C++ 20 in Visual Studio 2019 16.10, while a 16.11 preview centers on Hot Reload and .NET MAUI.