Visual C++: A bright future

Many of you out there that use Visual C++ on a day to day basis may have started to become dismayed by the way it seems to be lagging behind the likes of Visual Basic and Visual C#. Well people there is some good news. I was recently watching an interview with the Visual C++ team on channel 9, and it seems that they have seen the error of there ways and are working hard on pulling Visual C++ up to the standard of the rest of the Visual Studio suite.

Now for the bad news. Unfortunately not all of these cool new features will be ready in time for the next release of Visual Studio (Orcas), however we will be getting an updated version of MFC that will have all the common controls updated so they work correctly with themes etc, this in itself will be nice to have.

By the sounds of it the coolest features are going to take a while due to the fact that the Visual C++ compiler front end is still based around a 20 year old piece of software. It looks like in the the next version of Visual C++ they will have re-written a huge amount of code to give the compiler front end more flexibility to allow it to keep up with the likes of Visual C#.

Another good point I noticed was they are now starting to ease back a little from .NET as they have noticed that most of their customers have massive code bases, ranging in the millions of lines of code and expecting them to move over to .NET would be impossible. Instead they are going to introduce better interop libraries to allow for example .NET WPF front ends to better interact with native C++ back ends.

It'll be interesting to see what new tools we end up with. It's just a shame it's going to take so long.