This is a sad thing to get me excited but Microsoft seems to have been keeping something up its sleeve for Visual Studio 2008. Normally nothing is a surprise with Microsoft and I had assumed that we had seen all we would from VS2008 in the latest beta.
As it turns out they have a massive update for MFC dropping for Visual Studio 2008. It had been alluded to here and by Herb Sutter here. I assumed that we would have to wait for the version after VS2008 since the beta was largely the same as VS2005.
At Technet 2007 in Spain there is a talk:
Title/Code: TLA404 MFC Updates for Visual Studio 2008 and Beyond
Presenter: Ale Contenti
Abstract: This session will demonstrate the new features added to MFC in Visual Studio 2008, including support for Vista Common Dialogs, Vista Common Controls, the Microsoft Office 2007 Look and Feel (including support for an Office Ribbon style interface), Office and Visual Studio style Docking Toolbars and Tabbed Documents. We will also talk about our plans to evolve the MFC library for Visual C++ 10 and beyond. This is an in-depth session designed for experienced C++/MFC programmers. (C)
Do a search for the speaker here.
So it looks like the people using MFC will be getting some very powerful UI features as standard. I'm not so bothered about Vista standard controls but more powerful docking would be very nice and would go hand in hand with tabbed document interfaces. The most exciting part is the Office 2007 look 'n' feel along with the ribbon user interface (is it RibbonBar? I don't know...). I guess we will find out more in November but this is good news for people maintaining MFC systems.
