Announcing a major MFC update plus TR1 support

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Ayman Shoukry has announced an update to Visual Studio 2008 that is a 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 picker, color font live preview, print bar, shortcut Outlook-style menus, and toolbars Office-style look: XP 2003>
  • 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.
  • Plus many additional controls.

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 (first calendar quarter of 2008). 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 are several places where you can get additional information on this announcement: