mwirth

• Visual C++ 10: 10 is the new 6

  Nov 20, 2008 at 7:48 AM

  my thoughts exactly (well.. part of my thoughts. i have lots of positive ones regarding the compiler itself for this version). just compare that to what the managed crowd will get (or already has got). i know native c++ is an entirely different and more difficult playing field. but right now the sort of hype that's generated does not really involve native c++ but the managed world mostly. and iso language features arent visual studio features either. implementing iso standards (and not even fully implementing them..... and im not thinking of export template) is not a feature or anything noteworthy for me. its a requirement. comeau does it for 50 bucks (well.. no lambda support yet, but just wait a few weeks/months), gcc does it for free (soon-ish... i grant you that). so i need innovation in the IDE space.
  and as "Cache" put it, zoom isnt the holy grail there.
  
  this did sound a bit negative i know and of course its not meant as a personal attack or anything like that. im just a bit frustrated that essentially i could take a better notepad and have the same c++ support as in vs (well... not quite.. but you get my drift i guess). and implementing iso standards isnt a plus either. its a requirement like IE being standards compliant. its nothing to base your hype on (dont like the word hype myself.. but i dont know of anything better... but i mean "evangelism" i guess. which i dont like either )
  
  cheers there and thanks for your vs 2010 coverage!
  martin
  

• A lap around Windows 7 new Scenic Ribbon

  Nov 02, 2008 at 6:48 AM

  i just hope that people who have actually invested in getting to grips with the new ribbon additions to the MFC won't have to throw their code out the window again when the windows 7 ribbon arrives..... i can smell the turmoil already
  *if* this windows 7 ribbon cant be integrated seamlessly into MFC or there will be a co-existance of the mfc ribbon and the windows 7 ribbon, then i would have prefered that microsoft told developers that story before they bought and advertised the mfc ribbon. wouldnt make much sense to develop the mfc ribbon to the same flexibility and design that the windows 7 ribbon offers. we'll see.
  regards,
  martin
  

• Parallel Computing Platform: Asynchronous Agents for Native Code

  Oct 17, 2008 at 6:56 PM

  Thanks for your reply, Rick!  This all sounds very nice. im just trying to compare your system with what others came up with. i just like it when COM isn't involved because sometimes on compilers other than msvc this isnt the most of joy.
  also things like supporting allocators (e.g. 16 byte aligned allocators) wouldnt be the worst thing to have these days. but, i dont want to annoy you with that any further. it's just the things i 'd be looking for when choosing between the ms falvor and competitors'.
  cheers,
  martin
  btw. bleed is really great stuff.
  

• Parallel Computing Platform: Asynchronous Agents for Native Code

  Oct 16, 2008 at 5:28 PM

  Nice! another c++ video! always appreciated!
  There's one question that i think has not been asked yet (well.. there are more i guess): what form does that new c++ concurrency runtime take? i mean.. this all could be done as a pure header-only c++ library thats mainly driven by policy classes. is it "just" that (which i would always prefer) or is there some COM underneath? things like IAgent? (hope not ! )
  
  anyways! i think this is a very good approach, i just hope that the underlying machinery is not too heavy (something i've to install on a client machine via msi/msm for instance?).
  
  i hope you can understand what im trying to get at i just have the fear that there's people out there who would do this sort of thing as a header-only library thats included into every module.. and there might be a really heavy-weight approach with COM, libraries, dlls, versioning and whatnot.
  
  on which side are you?
  
  cheers!
  martin
  

• Bill Hill: The Future of Reading on the Web, Part 1

  Oct 09, 2008 at 3:53 PM

  hm this is a little bit of fanboy-ism that im exhibiting here.. but i must say that the hike around the ms campus with bill hill is still my favorite video on channel9. im actually thinking about the topic of this interview once in a while.... it has been a joy to watch it. havent seen this current video yet because of time constraints. but i sure will do so soon
  just wanted to say thanks for another bill hill video! ... and thanks for this wave of videos these days.. still have my hopes up that we'll see a herb sutter interview about concur ;)
  thanks charles, bill and team!
  

• Kate Gregory, Ale Contenti and Steve Teixeira: VC++ 2008 and Beyond

  Nov 28, 2007 at 3:24 PM

  thanks for this video! iÄm always happy to see that the vc++ team gets some channel9 love.
  
  the move from "oh we're going to make extensions to c++ here and there and lets push people to our managed environment" to the current  mindset is really good for vc++ and the c++ language in general.
  i'd even go so far and say that the managed push with managed c++ (back in the "__gc" times) and to some extent c++/cli hurt the c++ community.
  i 'd always prefer library solutions over compiler based solutions such as c++/cli. i know it's too late for that.. but what i mean is:
  the most pure solution would be to offer a static library or even a header-only library that i can call if i want to talk to managed code.
  let the library do all the tricks to talk to CLI code.
  id would add a layer but from a c++ language standpoint this would be much more pure a solution.
  
  there's also one aspect i always would like to add to the answer to "why do you like c++?" :
  
  i really like the way you can bend c++. the syntax is complicated / flexible enough to either write in a style that is really close to C89 if that's what you want. you can write in a java-like style and have hierarchies over hierarchies..
  you can be purely procedural.. or you can create complicated compile-time intensive yet incredible efficient code with template magic.
  
  that flexibility to choose your style within one language is really extraordinary.. C++ gives you the colors but the way you paint is really up to you.
  

• Pat Brenner: New Updates to MFC in Visual Studio 2008

  Nov 10, 2007 at 1:35 PM

  after watching this video i have to post again and say thanks. i think getting mfc up to shape again in order to enable c++ developers produce applications that users actually enjoy using is extremely important.
  more important to me is that i get this functionality out of the box when using mfc. using mfc together with third party mfc extensions in order to make mfc look good is not the way it should be. congratuations on solving that issue in such a magnificent way.
  
  when i saw this video i immediately enjoyed looking at some plain c++ mfc code after years of dealing with the qt way of creating windows, toolbars etc.
  
  if we got nice SOAP compliant client / server functionality in mfc i'm completely happy for a while ...
  

• Pat Brenner: New Updates to MFC in Visual Studio 2008

  Nov 09, 2007 at 1:26 PM

  SecretSoftware wrote: Why does C++ even exist? Why does MS keeps maintaining such a language that caused so many buffer overflows, and generally was not as secure as C# or Vb.NET.

  Because your operating system is built using it.
  

• Ale Contenti and Louis Lafreniere: Understanding Exceptions and When/How to Handle Them

  Sep 22, 2007 at 7:44 PM

  Thanks for your reply, damien! Just reading the abstract for this talk you mentioned assures me that it's ok for me to stay with native c++ for quite a while its so great that we might be getting a usable and current framework for windows development from microsoft again. i don't really enjoy using third party UI frameworks...
  
  Cheers!
  Martin
  

• Ale Contenti and Louis Lafreniere: Understanding Exceptions and When/How to Handle Them

  Sep 21, 2007 at 3:30 AM

  yes, yes! another interview with the vc++ team! i just can't wait to see the thing i've read on herb sutter's blog recently: "The thing we can't talk about but that has something to do with MFC". I suppose it's more than MFC 9.. i hope..
  anyway, thanks a lot, Charles, for these going deep videos - especially the ones from c++ land.
  

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