Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack Beta

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Microsoft is offering the beta version of its Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack, enabling development of applications with the look and feel of popular Microsoft products, Microsoft's S. "Soma" Somasegar said in his blog Tuesday. The Feature Pack extends Visual

Does giving native support for the Ribbon in MFC mean that it will be relatively easy for people to write .Net wrappers on top of that and before too long we could have free .Net libraries that _natively_ reproduce the ribbon?

I've played with Telerik's RibbonBar, but it's just not the same.  It's the best I've seen of the wannabes, but it's not native.

Is anyone already planning on / working on .Net wrappers for these new MFC capabilities?

I haven't found much in the last 5 days that is New and Notable but here is a few items of interest

Does that mean C++ snippets are supported now?

Mmm, native regular expressions :) My heart leaps with joy.

Hey I recently installed MSDN Library for Visual Studio 2008 and VS2008 Pro Trial but found that J# documentation was removed!! Although J# is not present, it's an absolute pain to install 2 MSDN versions simply for the sake of having J# documentation. Can MS make J# documentation available as an compiled CHM eBook or something?

The only thing which really sucks is that it is not supported on Express Edition on VC.

Can't something be done to that?

Hi Tanveer.  Unfortunately we don't have any short term solution for using the Feature Pack with Express.  When the Express product was originally defined it was decided not to include MFC.  We've reevaluated this decision and our hope is to ship MFC & ATL with future Express versions.  We'll need to wait until the next major release though.

Bill Dunlap

Visual C++ Development Team

The SKU for Visual Studio 2008 Team System Development Edition isn't recognized as a valid SKU by the installer package.  People who have this edition (and maybe others) can't install this update - the installer says 'none of the products this package updates are installed on this machine', or something to that effect.  

How should we work around this issue?  Thanks.

Would it be possible to add the following to the share_ptr implementation?

shared_ptr(_Ty* p = 0);

_Ty* operator->() const;

BTW, does anybody know when the Feature Pack will be out of beta?

Thanks

[Dave]

> Mmm, native regular expressions :)

> My heart leaps with joy.

Yes! And you will find that TR1 Regex is the most powerful and flexible regex library you've ever seen. regex_token_iterator is incredibly neat.

[Heitor Tome]

> Would it be possible to add the following to the

> share_ptr implementation?

Our shared_ptr<T> implementation already has an operator->() const which returns T *. It also has a default constructor, as well as a templated explicit constructor from U *. This is in exact agreement with the TR1 specification.

Note that shared_ptr<T> cannot have a shared_ptr(T * p = 0) constructor for several reasons:

1. Such a constructor would be an implicitly converting constructor from T *, which TR1 prohibits.

2. Such a constructor would convert arbitrary U * to T *, interfering with a subtle but required feature of shared_ptr (a shared_ptr<Base> can be constructed from a Derived *, even when Base lacks a virtual destructor, and Derived's destructor will still be called).

3. There is a subtle but important difference between default constructing a shared_ptr (said to be "empty") and constructing a shared_ptr from 0 (formally said to "own the null pointer"), which is why shared_ptr has a separate default constructor, instead of using a default argument. In particular, constructing an empty shared_ptr cannot throw, but constructing a shared_ptr that owns the null pointer can throw if it fails to allocate memory for a reference count.

If you have any further TR1 questions, feel free to E-mail me at stl@microsoft.com .

Stephan T. Lavavej

Visual C++ Libraries Developer, working on TR1

Hi Stephan,

just like James Swaine I use Visual Studio 2008 Team System for Developers which is not a supported SKU for MFCNext and TR1 beta. Is there any way to make the beta installable for that version of VS, too?

Regards,

Sven

I love how the C++ team is more than happy to answer questions about these new features, but they don't seem to care about the fact that half the people trying to use it can't even install it.  As a newcomer to the C++ world, this is my first exposure to all things C++, and I have to say I'm pretty underwhelmed by the team's lack of a response on this issue.

The ironic thing is that I would assume most developers who are using the Team System VS editions work for companies who can afford TFS, and people talk.  Just another reason to stick with other languages/technologies that are much better supported.

Hello James,

 Folks on the C++ team are currently looking into the installation issues. We discovered the reason for such issues and are investigating the appropriate actions.

Thanks in advance for your patience. We will make sure to communicate the result of the investigation.

Thanks,

Ayman Shoukry

Visual C++ Team