The final release of the Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack is now available for download. This release provides several exciting features for C++ developers, such as a major update to MFC and an implementation of TR1. These features are fully covered under Microsoft’s standard support policies.

The Feature Pack is available free of charge to any Visual Studio 2008 Standard or above customer. The download can be found at Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack Release.

Using the included MFC components, developers can create applications with the “look & feel” of Microsoft’s most popular products – Microsoft Office, Visual Studio and Internet Explorer. Some of the interesting MFC components in the Feature Pack include:

• Office 2007 Ribbon Bar: Ribbon, Pearl, Quick Access Toolbar, Status Bar, etc.
• Office 2003 and XP look: Office-style toolbars and menus, Outlook-style shortcut bar, print preview, live font picker, color picker, etc.
• Visual Studio look: sophisticated docking functionality, auto hide windows, property grids, MDI tabs, tab groups, etc.
• Internet Explorer look: Rebars and task panes Vista theme support
• “On the fly” menus and toolbar customization: users can customize the running application through live drag and drop of menu items and toolbar buttons
• Shell management classes: use these classes to enumerate folders, drives and items, browse for folders and more

For more information on the new MFC support:

• MFC documentation & walkthroughs
• Quick tour of new MFC functionality
• Channel 9: New Updates to MFC

TR1 (“Technical Report 1”) is a set of proposed additions to the C++0x standard. Our implementation of TR1 contains a number of important features such as smart pointers, regular expression parsing, containers (tuple, array, unordered set, etc) and sophisticated random number generators.

More information on TR1 can be found at the sites below:

• TR1 documentation
• What is this TR1 thing?>/a>
• Q&A on TR1 TR1 slide decks (recommended)
• Channel 9: Digging into TR1