As an update to Visual Studio 2008, we’re pleased to announce a major new release of the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC).  Using these components, developers will be able to create applications with the “look & feel” of Microsoft’s most popular applications – including Office, Internet Explorer and Visual Studio.  Some of the specific features include:

·         Office 2007 Ribbon Bar:   Ribbon, Pearl, Quick Access Toolbar, Status Bar, etc.

·         Office 2003 and XP look:  Office-style toolbars and menus, Outlook-style shortcut bar, print preview, live font picker, color picker, etc.

·         Internet Explorer look:  Rebars and task panes.

·         Visual Studio look: sophisticated docking functionality, auto hide windows, property grids, MDI tabs, tab groups, etc.

·         Vista theme support:  Dynamically switch between themes!

·         “On the fly” menus and toolbar customization:  Users can customize the running application through live drag and drop of menu items and toolbar buttons.

·         Shell management classes:  Use these classes to enumerate folders, drives and items, browse for folders and more.

·         + many additional controls

In addition, we will also be delivering TR1 support.  Portions of TR1 are scheduled for adoption in the upcoming C++0x standard as the first major addition to the ISO 2003 standard C++ library. Our implementation includes a number of important features such as smart pointers, regular expression parsing, new containers (tuple, array, unordered set, etc), sophisticated random number generators, polymorphic function wrappers, type traits and more!  We are not currently shipping C99 compatibility or support for special math functions. 

While we’re announcing these today, please note they won’t be final until Q1CY08.  Since we know you want to get your hands on them, we’ll have a beta sometime near the first of the new year.  The components will be available to all Visual Studio 2008 Standard and above customers.   This is just the first step in our drive to improve the native development experience.  There’s a lot more that we’re working on, but we hope you enjoy this first milestone.

There’s a lot more to tell you about the MFC libraries so keep watching this blog for more information!  You should also check out Pat Brenner’s video on Channel 9 where he talks about the new libraries.  You can also read what Soma had to say at http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2007/11/09/visual-c-libraries-update.aspx.

Visual C++ Development Team