Comments

@Charles: I don't want to name anything specific, just that both the clang talk and the questions during the panels were talking about many other things that have impact*. I have to add that you have had good bit of functional programming and STL visibility here, and things like IntelliTrace and DebuggerCanvas are exciting but I just wish there were more of this non-language stuff thrown around, especially if it's stuff that MS has advantage of doing because they could, if they wanted, take all parts of the end-to-end development experience further than what's the norm today.

I guess I just got spoiled with the language stars videos talking about language futures often quite often here, and when there's not as much futures talk around other things besides the language, the "law of rising expectations" kicked in and I was expecting to hear similar amount of hype around other things. 

* By impact I mean, a lot of the things in GoingNative were things that maybe C# developers take for granted. So having those in C++ is exciting, but what would be exciting for C# developers? How about things that C/C++ is good at, or completely novel stuff thats only possible if you have exclusive access to modify language, libraries, IDE, debugger and OS to make some compelling feature happen? I don't know what would that be, but it would certainly excite C# guys like me.

I think there's a bit too much focus (atleast on marketing side) on the languages, there's so much other things, many of which were briefly mentioned in the GoingNative panel talk points/audience questions that seem to be getting next to no "marketing" while they are very much key to productivity. I see a lot of videos in past years with "language rock stars" but I'd like to hear more on those other things.

Also I think it would be good to balance all the other language/compiler (and speakers talking about very exciting stuff being done in other companies) soon with some stuff that is from Microsoft. Otherwise there's a risk that people will get a "done" feeling. By that I mean: What has happened to Notepad (the editor control that it uses)? Not a whole lot, atleast in terms of supporting unixy line endings which are mandatory for notepad because notepad is the default editor for .txt and .txt often have different line-endings. MS always has some compatibility reason. Well I say, you have WinSXS taking seemingly gigabytes already, so why not add a new version of the control (or CLR or whatever) that goes boldly where the previous version can't go due to compatiblity reason/existing adoption hindering it?

@McHalls: Yeah I think Erik was interrupting a few too many times, when I'd have liked to hear more thorough explanation since we viewers may not guess/know everything that Beckman was about to say.

The concept reminds me of those annoying "You've earned a badge! Yippee!" popups at khanacademy. But I think they went away since I've not seen them recently.

Interesting interview but would have been nice to have a little deeper questions:

If app consists of multiple sequential or parallel executables, so that eg. excel.exe starts excel2.exe and then excel.exe terminates and excel2 starts multiple different exes with their own windows and excel2.exe terminates... will this kind of thing work with this model? What if there's also some LPC or shared memory IPC between these before the termination?

If app uses CreateFile to open \\.\C: (hope i got that right) or a PhysicalDisk and in order to run needs to be able to write and read somewhere on the disk without going through the filesystem apis, will your security layer virtualize this or will the app fail to run?

How do you "install" app onto this sandbox? Lot of talk about lack of 3D/HW support but would have been many more interesting questions about how to handle things related to what eg. game installers do, such as "sony rootkit drm", would that rootkit drm game install fine even if it was just 2D non-accelerated game. Also, would this approach work to enable better compatibility with Windows 3 & 95/98 apps/games using old DX apis?

Getting old windows games and apps to run is oft more pain than dos games in dosbox. If MS were to productize this research, it could end up like the current app compat layer, which can require a bunch (too much) of fiddling just to find the app you want to run is not going to run since even if you put compat mode "XP", the broken stuff tends to stay broken unless it was specifically tested by people in MS.

I think this type of legacy compatibility thing may be better using a hybrid development model: paid core team developing the long term goal deliveries and then allow the community using the product develop their own minor fixes and improvements that could be easily patched (by users, so simply that no instructions are needed) into the product on need basis. eg. if I as user run appX, it will check for community made fixes for appX and allow me to install those in the sandboxing layer or something, ensuring longevity and broadening compatibility as time goes on even if MS stops active development on the sandbox. Just a thought...

It says I'm using the physically nearest center however the site still takes its time to load. I suspect it has to do with me using Live to authenticate here.

Does ETL recording still wake up all sleeping hard drives when capture is stopped - very annoying issue in Windows 7 that affects all tools using event tracing? I don't know if the root cause is related for same happening when VS 2010 is startup with Customer Experience Improvement enabled but that could be.

I'll be doing some tests when I get Windows 8 installed to see if the captures now finally correlate to spikes in DPC latency checker which from user perspective correlates to actual glitches in application performance more so than what I've managed to capture with xperf.

@MrEd: Well put (and you didn't even mention optical/photonic computing).

Even with the new features in C++, it still needs more productivity features, and even when it would have them, they're still all very language centric and IDE features built around that turn out to break easily or be difficult to build/test etc and runtime cost of IDE/analysis features can be higher than with simpler languages.

I thought about if it would be possible to have the full C++ compiler considered as the "HTML4" and then have a "strict"-like subset of the full language and libraries used either solely or alongside in the a project but there's a lot of compromises and hard questions there and seems like high risk vs reward.

Besides Yet Another Language some other ideas could be (from the perspective of "I want to use C# but have the perf of C++ where needed") : take the C# compiler and make it spit out C++, or add a /native switch that turns C# into native code and allows free native interop so instead of making C++ slow with C++/CLI, give C# programs ability to do perf critical parts in native code with zero interop penalty and make the transitions completely static so in the compiled release binary it's seamless where the C# ends and C/C++ begins.

One trivial(?) thing that springs to mind when CRT is mentioned. I often find myself inside it when doing something with a native project and then there's a ton of those CRT etc files open. As a C# dude I'm used to quickly press Step In to traverse through a code I'm trying to understand. With native code I end up in CRT code or somewhere immediately with two presses of F11.

Why doesn't C++ have "Just my code" so I can Step In through my code quickly without actually ending up inside CRT or other MS code? (Maybe Shift-F11 or something to step inside if you really want to, without having to go into options to change the setting!)

With the same effort that goes to recognizing what is a CRT function (to avoid stepping in), those could be maybe optionally shown in different shade of color to tell when you can press "shift-f11" to step in.

The video mentioned at the end

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX11/EXT08