Here is an interesting article about C++ in Visual Studio Orcas. I get the feeling of deja vu from reading something similar...
Anyway some of the C++ stuff...
Vista styles support. Lots of work has been done on MFC to make it use the Vista common controls like file open dialogs and the rest.
New common controls. New common controls are available like a split button and network addresses and more.
Resource editor. It has been sorely in need of some work in recent releases and it looks like it will finally have support for 32bit colour images.
User Access Control. Some built in support for UAC through the manifests and the suchlike.
Compile in parallel. The parallel compilation will be ramped up to allow faster builds, which is always useful.
