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Inside Visual Studio 2008

Posted by Soulskill on from the looking-ahead dept.

mlimber writes "Dr Dobb's Journal has a peek at what is new in Microsoft's Visual Studio 2008. Most of the features discussed in the article are related to .NET, web development, and the IDE itself. However, Herb Sutter, Microsoft software architect and chair of the ISO C++ Standards committee, blogged about some developments on the C++ front. This includes a significantly enhanced MFC for GUI building, and the inclusion of TR1 (library extensions published by the C++ standards committee, most of which have also been incorporated into the next C++ standard)."

2 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. Re:C99 yet? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Kernel developers, system programmers and embedded developers do a lot of C, so does a lot of scientists who write in C instead of Fortran (as the restrict keyword in C99 solves the main issues with writing numerical code in C). Language runtimes tend to be written in C as well (e.g. the standard python distribution). So yes, people still write in C. Some developers (application developers for example), should naturally not write in pure C for most part (there are obviously some performance critical parts that are suitable for C).

  2. Re:Is it any better than Visual Studio 6? by TheThiefMaster · · Score: 4, Informative

    Have you tried MSVC++ 2005?

    The debugger is leaps and bounds ahead of the VC6 one.
    It supports parallel building of multiple projects on multicore cpus / multiple cpus (massively reducing build time).
    Built in x86-64 compiling / debugging (local machine and network) support.
    It supports link-time code generation (a major optimization improvement). The Pro version also supports profile-guided optimization.
    It supports OpenMP multithreading extensions for C++.
    Many many other improvements.

    The C++ .net extensions are optional. And, in my opinion, crap. If you want to use .net, you're better off with C#.
    Note: VC++ 2005 Express Edition (the free version) doesn't come with the Windows Platform SDK, and if you don't install it is only good for developing C++.net apps.

    The ONLY advantages to VC6 are: that it links programs against the VC6 runtime dll, which comes with most versions of Windows, right back to some 9x editions, where with VC2005 it links against the VC8 runtime dll, which most people need to install / you need to distribute it with your program / you need to static link with it, resulting in a larger .exe; and that it supports building .exes that run on Windows 95.
    Basically VC6's only advantage is that it's old.