Good new for developers and teams working on Microsoft Visual C++ projects! In this past year, Microsoft has publicly woken up and started re-investing in Visual C++. If you have upgraded to Visual Studio 2008, you can beta test some new and significant functionality coming down the pike for MFC.
This new functionality is part of the optional Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack Beta. Here is a brief overview:
The Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack extends the VC++ Libraries shipped with Visual Studio 2008. The VC++ 2008 MFC libraries have been extended to support creation of applications that have:
- Office Ribbon style interface
- Office 2007, Office 2003 and Office XP look and feel
- Modern Visual Studio-style docking toolbars and panes
- Fully customizable toolbars and menus
- A rich set of advanced GUI controls
- Advanced MDI tabs and groups
- And much more!
This feature pack also includes an implementation of TR1. Portions of TR1 are scheduled for adoption in the upcoming C++0x standard as the first major addition to the ISO 2003 standard C++ library. Our implementation includes a number of important features such as:
- Smart pointers
- Regular expression parsing
- New containers (tuple, array, unordered set, etc)
- Sophisticated random number generators
- Polymorphic function wrappers
- Type traits
- And more!
Here is a brief tour of new MFC GUI additions.
If you are using VS 2008, here is where you can grab the Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack Beta.
And, here is the Feature Pack documentation.
Posted by dataland 
