I brought home a paper copy of MSDN magazine from Tech Ed and found this as one of the cover stories: An Inside Look At The Next Generation Of Visual C++. It's by Tarek Madkour and definitely worth a read. Were you wondering if MFC's wrapper for the new file dialog would be tweaked so you get the all-singing all-dancing new Vista common file dialog? Yes it will. Will there be a class to represent a Command Link? Yes. And a split buttton? Yes. Pretty much all the new controls and dialogs are in the new MFC. There's also resource editor support for PNG, for 32 bit images, and for large icons.

As I mentioned in my blog post about Sarita's Channel 9 Video, UAC support is also a lot easier. Then there's the marshaling library and STL/CLR. Toss in faster builds, and make developers everywhere happy. Roll on, release day.

Kate

Herb Sutter reports on the April meeting of the ISO C++ standards committee. They are now consistently referring to C++ 09 not C++ 0x (with a hope that x would not be hex, which seems to be turning out ok.) The meeting added features to the draft standard for the language itself (template aliases aka typedef templates, variadic templates, and unicode) and for the standard library (variadic templates, unicode, and rvalue references.)

The next meeting is July 15th - 20th in Toronto. I am trying to plan to be there.

Kate

Have you tried writing a gadget yet? They're really simple and can have an immediate impact on your productivity. If you're a Canadian adult, you can enter your gadget into Microsoft Canada's contest and win some serious hardware.

The contest site has plenty of links to get you started and give you some inspiration. You have till July 16th, so get creating!

Kate

I like to let Hugh MacLeod's gapingvoid cartoons rattle around in my brain for a while before I decide if I like them or not. It's a fine line between pithy and banal, after all. This one is working for me:

Keeps my focus where it belongs, even when making custom software or mentoring the folks who are making the software. Forest and trees, don'tcha know.

Kate

Have you ever heard the career advice that you should consider doing some volunteer work in your field to gain experience? Sounds like a lovely plan, but how does someone without contacts find volunteer opportunities anyway? Or maybe you have the job you want, but you want to put your time and effort to a good cause, if only you could find one. If you're in Canada, MatchIT.com is just the ticket. Sign up, fill out a form, and get matched with needs from nonprofits. There's lots of folks looking to have their websites redone, or a registration system written, or their servers looked after. It's a chance to make a real difference, so please look into it if you have some time to spare.

Kate

Recently I had some major issues with a VPC somebody prepared for me. It came from a DVD and I just could not get it to run on Vista, though it ran great on XP. I was fairly sure that it would run OK if I could just launch VPC elevated and then open the .vmc file, but when I launched VPC (elevated or not) the only evidence of its existence was a taskbar entry (there was no window to be seen) and even that disappeared if I right-clicked on it.

I solved the first problem by granting Users access to the .vmc and .vhd files (I went with Full Control since I had them on a non-shared drive) and then the VPC ran perfectly. That was a better fix than elevating VPC every time anyway. But along the way I discovered how to fix the disappearing console. This post by Steve at EssJae.com shows what you need to do: find the options.xml file in C:\Users\%current_user%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Virtual PC and open it -- make sure the console is not up and you're not running a VPC. Scroll down and find the <console> section  and you will see some very large numbers for left_position and top_position. Change them to something normal, like 10 or 100, and save the file and you'll be back in business.

Kate

During my blogging gap, some good channel 9 videos came out. I wanted to highlight Ale Contenti: VC++ Safe Libraries and More. Ale is the new Martyn Lovell and he wants to show you the safe libraries and how to write sensible C++ code. If you like to see C++ code written live on the whiteboard (no intellisense, no compiler to find your typos) this is the video for you

But wait, there's more. How about a C++ program without pointers? Well, without explicit use of pointers. Check it out.

Kate

Visual C++ is hiring a development manager. They have some reasonably high expectations on experience, proven track records, and so on. If you think you want the job by all means check it out. If you don`t think you want the job, but just want to keep on making C++ code and know there will be a product and a team there for you, read this quote from the job description (bolding by me):

The top 1,500 ISVs generate over 80% of worldwide software revenues. In addition to driving the global Windows ecosystem, these companies are directly responsible for $5B-$7B of yearly Microsoft revenue. Central to the success of these customers, as well as Microsoft's own internal development, is Visual C++. Given the strategic importance of the ISV segment, the Visual C++ team is on a mission to revolutionize our toolset in providing a much more productive and successful native developer experience.
We are looking for a strong Visual C++ Development Manager to drive adoption and satisfaction among professional C++ developers. We are in the starting phase of a major reinvigoration of the experience for C++ and native development targeting very large and complex development projects. The added demands of security and the advent of many-core processing create significant challenges and opportunities to create market leading technologies and tools.
The Visual C++ team is working hand in hand with the Windows division on enhancing the appeal of Vista and Windows 7 for ISV developers and with the CLR team to create a technology stack that allows layering of services to provide a seamless spectrum from native code over type safety and garbage collection to the full .Net stack.

Responsibilities
The Visual C++ DM position features leadership opportunities across multiple areas, including Technology and Architecture Leadership and Execution, Team Building and People Leadership.
You will lead a world class C++ compiler team and C++ IDE team embarking on a virtually top to bottom re-architecture of the tools stack. In addition, you will lead a libraries team that is re-inventing the MFC and client libraries for the next decade together with the Windows WEX and Developer Division UIFX teams. You will grow a strong cross-PU architect team and a development organization.
The Visual C++ DM plays an important role in cross-team relationships (Windows, CLR, UIFX, Office, SQL) and cross-company relationships (Intel, AMD, C++ standards work).

Wow! Looks like we`re all in for a great ride. If you really know your stuff, go help. If you just like to use it, hang on!

Kate