This is the "big deal" day for me, a day spent with the C++ team immersed in "what's new in Whidbey" and beyond. I've just about completed my mapping of faces to email addresses and delivered some copies of my book to a few people who really helped me while I was writing it. I am taking notes like a maniac, on new IDE features for C++ specifically, on new ways of managing property settings for C++ projects, on converting from old Managed C++ syntax to the new syntax, and so on.

The Developer Tools Roadmap has been updated. It shows some of what's new in Whidbey and looking forward into Orcas. Embedded C++ moving into Visual Studio, the new C++ syntax, templates and generics together, the true return of deterministic destruction with reference types allocated on the managed heap or the stack as you prefer, major optimization improvements for both native and managed code (especially PGO), and more. Of course whatever you see listed under other languages may well apply to C++ too, things like improvments in the Base Class Libraries, ADO.NET, and the rest.