As part of the Visual C++ effort of introducing our new strategy to the C++ developers, Ulzii Luvsanbat and myself (Ayman Shoukry) are currently in Korea talking to the Korean developers about our strategy and the new features in Visual C++ 2008. The Microsoft Korean subsidiary did an excellent job organizing the events and customer meetings. More information on the events could be found at http://www.microsoft.com/korea/msdn/events/msdn071012/. We have met so far with a large number of companies across different disciplines and all seemed enthusiastic about the new direction. The majority of the customers were really happy that we are bringing back the class designer which is something that recent builds of VC++ missed. In addition, the Intellisense fixes we are doing in VC2008 were very well received. Another highlight of the meetings was our renewed investment in native libraries like MFC. Customers were really  happy to see such additions.

We received lots of good feedback and suggestions especially regarding refactoring, supporting more development techniques (pair/parallel programming), concurrency, simplifying the MFC framework, developing industry specific libraries, and many more. Tonight we will be meeting with the VC++ MVPs in Korea in addition to a developer community event that is held at the MS subsidiary in Korea.  We are looking forward to more of the great feedback. We will make sure to share with you all more of the details once we are back in Redmond.

Thanks,

Ayman Shoukry & Ulzii Luvsanbat