I've made it into the second month of my proposed monthly column for Developer.com on Visual C++, so I'm moderately proud. On top of running the
Sydney Deep .NET User Group, delivering the Whidbey Ascend training last Thursday, doing a bi-monthly column for MSDN Magazine (Australia and New Zealand Edition), and preparing for my round-the-country WSE 2 talk in December (plus the full time consulting thing), it was pretty brutal getting this one out.
Covering CodeDom and C++ made my realize how many things where not quite right with the initial two releases of Visual C++.NET. While it was certainly a useable product, it was a bit of a step back from the polished finish of V6. I feel sorry for the C++ team - they have so many competing objectives, and the product has a surface area about five times bigger than other compilers like C# and VB.NET.
My gut feeling that C++ has slipped firmly into the niche category was confirmed when doing the Ascend training. I had 25 or so for the C# session, and 2 for C++. Regardless of the popularity wane, I think it is still am important product, and I really congratulate Microsoft on the time and expense it is going to in making Visual C++ a great product.
Posted
Nov 03 2004, 12:57 AM
by
nick