Addition for the Visual C++ Developer

For those of you developers that are still using Visual C++, a new Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack has been added :) for Visual Studio 2008, so now it has been updated from a couple of years ago, click on here http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D466226B-8DAB-445F-A7B4-448B326C48E7&displaylang=en for the download.

The new and improved feature and functionility includes a much more modernised user interface with now the supply of the Office Ribbon User Interface, see above diagram, amongst many other new controls like dialogue boxes to the Standard C++ library. Hurrah!

There is also an updated feature called Smart Pointers that allow dynamically created C++ objects to be carefully handled and ensures objects to be deletely safely with the library function auto_ptr in handling these C++ pointers. For instance the code below, allows the transfer of ownership from one application to another for the auto_ptr copy constructor, for allowing to share the same memory resource: -

shared_ptr sp(new int(123));

ASSERT(0 != sp);

// increase reference count of shared object
shared_ptr sp2(sp);

ASSERT(0 != sp2);
ASSERT(0 != sp);

See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc507634.aspx for more information.