TR1

Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack is now available

The Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack I talked about before is finished and ready for download. This includes a bulk of the TR1 updates (sadly, still no cstdint) and some major MFC updates.

Digging into TR1

Channel 9 has an interview with Stephan T. Lavavej of the Visual C++ team showing off some of the new features in TR1, the new draft standard library additions for C++0x. While the interview will probably have nothing new for competent C++ developers, Stephan does go into good detail explaining the unique strengths of C++ that newbies may not immediately see.

If you’ve thought of C++ but have been scared by its complexity, or have been tempted by newer garbage collected languages like C#, this will probably be a good eye opener.

Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack beta

It’s here! A beta of the promised TR1 library update has been put up for download.

Included in the pack is an update to MFC that adds a number of Office-style controls. Wish they’d put these out as plain Win32 controls, because I’ve got no intention of using MFC!

Visual Studio 2008 released, TR1 support coming

Anyone following Visual Studio 2008 will know that although it offers a plethora of new features for the managed world, there was little focus on the unmanaged side of things. Now that it is finally out the door, I guess it’s a good time to look at what few new features are there for us unmanaged C++ coders.

Not much, huh? That’s because Microsoft was running under the assumption that people would flock to C# and only use unmanaged C++ to maintain "legacy" code. Perhaps the best news so far, they’ve finally realized their mistake. Although they didn’t have time to put things into VC++ 2008, they have re‐committed to unmanaged code for the next version and in the meantime made a small separate announcement that they will be bringing VC++ 2008 users a mostly complete TR1 implementation update in early January.