VC++ 2008 Feature Pack Released Today

The VC++ 2008 Feature Pack, with a new version of MFC and an implementation of TRE1, has officially been released today!  The download is free for for any VS2008 Standard or above customer and is a fully supported product.  You can find the download here.

The key new features for MFC include the ability to achieve the look and feel of Office 2007 (Ribbon, Pearl, Quick Access Toolbar, Status Bar, etc), Office 2003, Visual Studio (docking, auto hide, property grids, MDI tabs, etc), IE, and Vista.  In addition you'll find new Shell management classes which allow you to enumerate folders, drives & items, browse and more.  This update provides a perfect opportunity to update your MFC application.  You can find a detailed walk through for MFC here. 

The TR1 implementation includes several important features including smart pointers, regular expression parsing, new containers such as tuple/array/etc, sophisticated random number generators, polymorphic function wrappers, etc.  There is a lot to explore here and you can find a walk through here with more details.

Enjoy!