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Table-pounding Evangelism of Visual C++

Today has been a long day. The language design team is getting ready to release a draft of the language specification the the ECMA technical group. The TG5 meetings for ECMA start in just under a month. It’s very exciting, and the countdown is leading to a lot of last minute work. Look forward to seeing the early draft of the language specification on the Visual C++ dev center soon.

Anyways, someone forwarded a link around to an InfoWorld article talking about Visual C++. His takeaways from my presentation resonated with a number of other people I met at PDC. There is so much to look forward to from Whidbey, I’m just glad that the Visual C++ message is memorable enough weeks after PDC. We really do love smart developers, and we’re working hard to support them.

For tomorrow, I am working on a history and rationale for the design of handles in the language. A handle is a new declarator we are adding, the caret (^), which implies garbage collection. It is the reason the slogan on the bright yellow shirt passed out at the PDC is:

                   Visual
      Can you handle ^ C++?
Published Wednesday, November 12, 2003 11:59 PM by branbray

Comments

# RE: Table-pounding Evangelism of Visual C++

Wednesday, December 24, 2003 1:54 PM by Mark Richards
I guess I'm a little late on this, but I just read the InfoWorld article referenced in this blog entry, and I couldn't agree more with the author's assessment of the current direction of VC++. I, and many of the developers I talk with regularly, are truly disappointed with how MS has tried to push natvie C++ away in favor of "safer" and "managed" technologies. Today's best Windows applications are written in native C++, and I believe (strongly) that C++ remains an excellent language for developing for the Windows platform. It should remain a high priority of Microsoft, and not be relegated to some obscure "systems level" language (as has already been suggested). I dunno, maybe I'm just behind the times, but I'd love to see VC++ regain its former glory in Whibdey.

# re: Table-pounding Evangelism of Visual C++

Sunday, April 18, 2004 12:32 PM by Robert Björn
Microsoft are moving quickly towards .NET (WinFx in Longhorn is fully based on managed APIs, after all), and as such I think it's important that there is a viable migration path for C++ applications. It needs to be possible to do just about anything in C++ -- cleanly -- that can be done in C#. While I am a big advocate of standards and generally hate custom "extensions, "I think that this is one of the cases where it might be not only acceptable but necessary.

Thanks for your very interesting articles, Brandon!
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