My Tech Ed USA talk this year was "Vista and C++/CLI - a Natural Fit". A lot of Vista goodness is hard to get to from managed code. In the precon I showed you how leveraging other people's work (specifically the Vista Bridge and the Preview Handler Framework Stephen Toub wrote for MSDN Magazine) can eliminate some of that difficulty. In my C++ talk I drilled a little further, into things like property handlers that can only be in native code (same for thumbnail providers though I didn't show one) and flukes of the IDE that (for Visual Studio 2005 anyway) make adding a UAC manifest easier for C++ developers. The slides should be on CommNet for registered attendees, and if you want the code samples you can drop me a line. The property handler sample is straight out of the SDK so I don't need to send you that.

Kate