VC++ .NET Examples, a tiny Visual Studio timeline, how to participate in the Whidbey Beta

Reader Dave commented:

back to lack of visual c++ .net examples. I saw that there are lots of c# examples, this is good because C# is a new language and if i am correct, it is built for .net. there are vb.net examples, too, but there is not a visual c++ .net example displaying a window on the screen (or i didnt see any). so i am playing with console and sockets, and it is getting boring.

I did a little digging, and came up with some samples for Visual C++ .NET that you might not have seen. I believe these examples were made for VC++ 7.0, and not for 7.1. The samples cover a wide variety, including some dealing with Windows Forms, which should get your feet wet with the .NET UI APIs. (If you're looking for some VC++ 7.1 / Codename Everett examples, you might be interested in looking here.)

i see whidbey samples everywhere, in your blog for instance, but not much examples for vs2002. it seems i need to upgrade vs2003 as soon as possible.

There are plenty of good reasons to upgrade from .NET 2002 to .NET 2003 (and don't just take our word for it.)

But, there may be some confusion on the generations of Visual Studio (and of our compiler), so I'm going to try and clear it up. Since Visual Studio 6, there have been two releases. Visual Studio 7.0 (”Visual Studio .NET”) and Visual Studio 7.1 (”Visual Studio .NET 2003”). I don't know about the other products, so I won't try and outline the changes for anything but Visual C++ between these releases.

VC++ 7.0, also known as Visual C++ .NET 2002, was the first product to contain Managed Extensions.

VC++ 7.1, also known as Visual C++ .NET 2003, also known as Codename Everett, is a great compiler, and Microsoft's latest public offering. It has a whole lot of standards and conformance work, and other increases in perf, stability, etc.

Codename Whidbey, the compiler we're working on currently, is the only compiler to feature the new managed syntax I'm always blathering on about in my blog. It isn't in public release yet (there's an Alpha program currently), but we'll have a Beta hopefully in the next six months.

If you're interested in participating in the Beta, you can sign up here. Enter your Passport information, use 'BetaReq' (case sensitive) as your guest login, and fill out the survey. If you're lucky, you'll be part of the Whidbey Beta program.