Microsoft have just released the beta of the Visual Studio 2008 "Feature Pack" which is an update for the C++ portion of the environment. The main features are substantial updates to MFC and TR1 library support.
The VC++ 2008 MFC libraries have been extended to support creation of applications that have:
* Office Ribbon style interface
* Office 2007, Office 2003 and Office XP look and feel
* Modern Visual Studio-style docking toolbars and panes
* Fully customizable toolbars and menus
* A rich set of advanced GUI controls
* Advanced MDI tabs and groups
* And much more!
This feature pack also includes an implementation of TR1. Portions of TR1 are scheduled for adoption in the upcoming C++0x standard as the first major addition to the ISO 2003 standard C++ library. Our implementation includes a number of important features such as:
* Smart pointers
* Regular expression parsing
* New containers (tuple, array, unordered set, etc)
* Sophisticated random number generators
* Polymorphic function wrappers
* Type traits
* And more!
Note: This feature pack does not include C99 compatibility or support for special math functions.
Certainly for anyone maintaining MFC based products it is a free upgrade tot he look and feel of the program with tons of advantages.
You can download it here. Unfortunately it tries to force you to download Silverlight which I have been avoiding like the plague but the attempts to get you to install it from Microsoft are getting more aggressive.
