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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)."

6 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. C99 yet? by hpa · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Do they actually have C99 support yet?

    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. Thanks for asking by Tony · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Fuck, yes.

    C++ sucks. It's a half-assed attempt at an object-oriented language, combining the easy memory model of C with the simple OO model of Simula. I used to think the only good thing about C++ was templates. Then I figured out that templates suck, too, because they're damned near impossible to debug, for most non-trivial bugs.

    I fuckin' *hate* C++. I'd much rather have to code straight C while being punched repeatedly by a baboon.

    Objective-C is much less ugly. But then, so is LISP. (Actually, LISP is a damned good language. It's just not *pretty*, in a strictly aesthetic sense.)

    So, to not be snide, there are *many* people who still code in C. There are many objective reasons to avoid C++. (This *was* about C++, wasn't it?)

    --
    Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
    1. Re:Thanks for asking by iangoldby · · Score: 5, Interesting

      [C++ is] a half-assed attempt at an object-oriented language, combining the easy memory model of C with ...
      Took me a moment to realise you were being sarcastic.

      Seriously though, what's so difficult about the memory management model of C? I find it hard to think of anything much simpler. The great thing about C (IMHO) is that if you didn't write it, it won't happen.
  3. Re:Is it any better than Visual Studio 6? by ThaReetLad · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Well, we're just completing the porting of approx 1 million lines of VC++6 to VS 2008, and I have to say it's been so worth it. The new compiler picks up on and warns about many more potential problems, and there's also the issue of whole program optimisation. Also the debugger in VS2008 is much better than the VC6.0 one. I have to say, I think VS2008 is pretty great. A lot of the niggly little problems in VS2005 have now been dealt with, and speaking as someone who is just now starting to write some C# after 9 years writing C++ the LINQ stuff and lambda expressions are just great.

    --
    You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
  4. Upgrades to MFC? what upgrades? by master_p · · Score: 5, Interesting

    MFC - we are working on a huge update to MFC that should knock your socks off. I can't tell you too much right now, but this is closer than you might [think]

    What do they mean?

    Do they mean, perhaps, that widgets are now normal objects? no double-creation (first new Object, then object->CreateWindow).

    Could they mean that all widgets are destroyed in the same way? no object->DestroyWindow for some widgets, delete object for some other widgets?

    How about some serious memory management using shared pointers? no temp CBrush objects etc.

    How about layout management? all serious widget toolkits have that. It's 2008, we should not have to position widgets manually.

    What about the tab widget? in MFC, the tab widget is not a real widget: you have to manually hide and show controls upon tab click.

    What about the model-view-controller pattern? this is 2008, should I still manually copy edited data from widgets to the data model of my application? most other toolkits support the MVC pattern. Dialog Data eXchange is a joke, of course.

    How about the issue of message maps? Qt proves you don't need stinkin' message maps, which are hard to maintain, difficult to understand, and dangerous because casting is untyped and done through macros.

    How about MIME type support?

    These, and a lot more, are the issues that have driven developers away from MFC to Qt or WxWidgets. I have been maintaining a line of products based on MFC for the last 10 years, but this year I've decided I had enough: all the products are to be rewritten with Qt/WxWidgets. I will only approach MFC if it will approach Qt/WxWidgets quality.