Maybe my exüectatiosn were too high… in general I would say that most of the sessions do not go deep. Mostly they only touch the surface…
Of course, there are also some exceptions: All C++ sessions are realy great!
The first session was “What’s new in Visual C++ 2008”. Just a short overview:
- Vista only: In the Project Properties under “Manifest” you now can explicite set the UAC-Level (asInvoker, highestAvailability, requireAdministrator); so no need to specify this “by hand”; if you upgrade your project it will by default generate an manifest with UAC set to “asInvoker”, so you do not face virtualization problems under Vista
- Class designer for C++; but only for viewing; there is currently now two-way direction for editing in the class designer and reflection this changes in he code; but better than nothing…
- Vista-only: Randomizing the base address; this allows vista to use a random base address at startup; this helps to prevent code-injection into the process; this is also on by default for all MS DLLs. Also you can mark your program that it can deal with “data execution prevention /NXCOMPAT)
- Multiprocessor build for cl.exe! This is also great news! It will allow to speed up the build process even if you just have one project (in VS2005 multi processor support was only possible if you had many solutioons which did not depend on each other)
- Incremental build for managed code
- Many areas with performance improvements in VS2005, like: Load solution performance, editor/IntelliSense responsiveness
The second session was “Best practices for Native-Managed InterOp in VC++ 2008 ; also a short summary:
- Introduction to STL.NET (STL which can be used with managed types); these system is faster than the .NET collections 😉
- Marshaling Library (marshal_as<to> (from) ); this is a very exciting feature and can be extended with only implementations
So today, we can be look forward to see the two sessions about C++/CLI with Vista and MFC-Updates!
Stay tuned…