Pat Brenner: New Updates to MFC in Visual Studio 2008

Posted By: Charles | Nov 9th, 2007 @ 4:39 AM

The VC++ team has made a committment to innovating, in a native context, both the C++ language and associated libraries. The focus of the group is squarely on making VC++ a great language for native Windows development. In Visual Studio 2008, C++ developers will get a MFC library that contains twice the functionality of previous versions.

Here, we meet Pat Brenner. Pat is a Senior SDE on the VC++ libraries team and has implemented many of the improvements to MFC in VS 2008. He's also been at Microsoft for quite some time: 19.5 years!

Tune in and learn about some of the exciting new features of MFC 2008.

Check out Soma's blog for his perspective on this (Soma runs the developer division)

Tags: C++, MFC

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cro

Just has we are thinking of moving our MFC app to C# Tongue Out

SecretSoftware

Why does C++ even exist? Why does MS keeps maintaining such a language that caused so many buffer overflows, and generally was not as secure as C# or Vb.NET.

The only + point for C++ is that it compiles into machine code directly, and if we can get C# to do that, then there is no need for a language like C++.

I was wondering why C++ still exists when C# is that good of a language.

MS, why not retire C++, and just focus on C# and Vb.NET and F#?

Expand C# capabilities, and get rid of P/invoke and replace it with a new kind of mechanism to call dlls outside the .NET framework.

Finally, make the .NET framework really .NET, in the sense that it is distributed in terms of processing power, by enabling sharing. So that my application could use the processor that is Idle in a second room in the the house, automatically through the use of Remoting in LAN.

Kill C++, and lets all be on one page, with C#.

Its confusing many people, and things needs to be simpler, with few languages. C# for experts, VB.NET for beginners and intermediates.

That is all.

PS: some might say, there are programmers outthere who enjoy dealing with buffer overflows, and the pains of C++, and to them I say stick with Visual Studio 6 C++ IDE. and that is that. Mad

John Melville-- MD

SecretSoftware wrote:

Why does C++ even exist? Why does MS keeps maintaining such a language that caused so many buffer overflows, and generally was not as secure as C# or Vb.NET.

I'm hoping I just missed the sarcasm in that comment.

Even if we assume, as you seem to, that C++ is an obsolete and uselss language then there are still billions of lines of C++ code out there that work and do the job they were designed, and purchased, to do. There is absolutely no chance that all of that investmen is just going to vanish any time in the next several decades. C++ will be with us through the remainder of any of our careers and well beyond.

Since someone will be maintaining C++ code for the next 3 decades at least, Microsoft has, wisely, decided to make more money by selling modern tools to those developers.

PS: I still find C++ to be pretty useful in some circumstance. I'm just ingroning that for this post.

kappel

SecretSoftware wrote:

Why does C++ even exist? Why does MS keeps maintaining such a language that caused so many buffer overflows, and generally was not as secure as C# or Vb.NET.

The only + point for C++ is that it compiles into machine code directly, and if we can get C# to do that, then there is no need for a language like C++.

I was wondering why C++ still exists when C# is that good of a language.

MS, why not retire C++, and just focus on C# and Vb.NET and F#?

Expand C# capabilities, and get rid of P/invoke and replace it with a new kind of mechanism to call dlls outside the .NET framework.

Finally, make the .NET framework really .NET, in the sense that it is distributed in terms of processing power, by enabling sharing. So that my application could use the processor that is Idle in a second room in the the house, automatically through the use of Remoting in LAN.

Kill C++, and lets all be on one page, with C#.

Its confusing many people, and things needs to be simpler, with few languages. C# for experts, VB.NET for beginners and intermediates.

That is all.

PS: some might say, there are programmers outthere who enjoy dealing with buffer overflows, and the pains of C++, and to them I say stick with Visual Studio 6 C++ IDE. and that is that.

Wow. Just wow. You are aware that C++ is the language that many (if not all) games are written in, yes? I would hazard to guess that Halo is written in it, along with pretty much any other resource intensive/high frames per second game. MS doesn't have the power to "kill C++" as you put it, much less to they "maintain" it. Your post is mindnumbingly naive and frankly embarrassing to read.

mwirth

SecretSoftware wrote: Why does C++ even exist? Why does MS keeps maintaining such a language that caused so many buffer overflows, and generally was not as secure as C# or Vb.NET.

Because your operating system is built using it.

figuerres

SecretSoftware wrote:

Why does C++ even exist? Why does MS keeps maintaining such a language that caused so many buffer overflows, and generally was not as secure as C# or Vb.NET.

The only + point for C++ is that it compiles into machine code directly, and if we can get C# to do that, then there is no need for a language like C++.

I was wondering why C++ still exists when C# is that good of a language.

MS, why not retire C++, and just focus on C# and Vb.NET and F#?

Expand C# capabilities, and get rid of P/invoke and replace it with a new kind of mechanism to call dlls outside the .NET framework.

Finally, make the .NET framework really .NET, in the sense that it is distributed in terms of processing power, by enabling sharing. So that my application could use the processor that is Idle in a second room in the the house, automatically through the use of Remoting in LAN.

Kill C++, and lets all be on one page, with C#.

Its confusing many people, and things needs to be simpler, with few languages. C# for experts, VB.NET for beginners and intermediates.

That is all.

PS: some might say, there are programmers outthere who enjoy dealing with buffer overflows, and the pains of C++, and to them I say stick with Visual Studio 6 C++ IDE. and that is that.

WOW....

please do some resarch in to the topic.

like C and C++ are ANSI standards for a start, not owned by Microsoft or any other company.

and MSFT has provided new C Runtime libraries to help with buffer and memory problems.

and so on...

mawcc

Hmm, I really would have liked to see the stuff shown in this video to be part of WinForms 3.5.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the improvements for C++ programmers, but it further complicates the MS UI technology landscape.

To achieve Office 2007 look & feel in managed code, you have to rely on 3rd party WinForms controls. WPF is the way to go in the future, but currently lacks a variety of controls we got used to in WinForms.

So it boils down to the problem that the managed UI world is in a transitioning phase between (old) WinForms 2.0 and (new) WPF, and in between is a large gap that ironically C++/MFC seems to fill perfectly (although only conceptually, since the technology is not usable from managed code).

SecretSoftware

John Melville, MD wrote:

SecretSoftware wrote:Why does C++ even exist? Why does MS keeps maintaining such a language that caused so many buffer overflows, and generally was not as secure as C# or Vb.NET.

I'm hoping I just missed the sarcasm in that comment.

Even if we assume, as you seem to, that C++ is an obsolete and uselss language then there are still billions of lines of C++ code out there that work and do the job they were designed, and purchased, to do. There is absolutely no chance that all of that investmen is just going to vanish any time in the next several decades. C++ will be with us through the remainder of any of our careers and well beyond.

Since someone will be maintaining C++ code for the next 3 decades at least, Microsoft has, wisely, decided to make more money by selling modern tools to those developers.

PS: I still find C++ to be pretty useful in some circumstance. I'm just ingroning that for this post.

Let these people use VS 6 , it has C++ 6 and its good for them.

I Yearn for the day when Visual Studio will not have C++ in it anymore.

OSes will be using managed code in the future.

Games too.

So lets just slowly get rid of C++ and focus on C#.

C# is the future, and C++ brings back bad memories , of sleepless nights.

Customers who still use C++ should upgrade to C#. And that is that.

Any one who likes C++ should just stay with VS 6. or previous builds of vs.

SecretSoftware

figuerres wrote:

SecretSoftware wrote:Why does C++ even exist? Why does MS keeps maintaining such a language that caused so many buffer overflows, and generally was not as secure as C# or Vb.NET.

The only + point for C++ is that it compiles into machine code directly, and if we can get C# to do that, then there is no need for a language like C++.

I was wondering why C++ still exists when C# is that good of a language.

MS, why not retire C++, and just focus on C# and Vb.NET and F#?

Expand C# capabilities, and get rid of P/invoke and replace it with a new kind of mechanism to call dlls outside the .NET framework.

Finally, make the .NET framework really .NET, in the sense that it is distributed in terms of processing power, by enabling sharing. So that my application could use the processor that is Idle in a second room in the the house, automatically through the use of Remoting in LAN.

Kill C++, and lets all be on one page, with C#.

Its confusing many people, and things needs to be simpler, with few languages. C# for experts, VB.NET for beginners and intermediates.

That is all.

PS: some might say, there are programmers outthere who enjoy dealing with buffer overflows, and the pains of C++, and to them I say stick with Visual Studio 6 C++ IDE. and that is that.

WOW....

please do some resarch in to the topic.

like C and C++ are ANSI standards for a start, not owned by Microsoft or any other company.

and MSFT has provided new C Runtime libraries to help with buffer and memory problems.

and so on...

they can stop supporting it in future VS builds.