Microsoft Visual C++ provides a dominant and flexible development environment for creating Microsoft Windows based applications. Microsoft has released the new version of Visual C++ 8. It is aimed at designing and developing Win32 and Win64 applications. It has a support for Game Creator which you can use to develop 2D and 3D games very easily. Microsoft has updated MFC with the new tools and libraries. Using this update to MFC, developers will be able to create applications with the “look and feel” of Microsoft’s Office, Internet Explorer and Visual Studio.
It also supports TR1, is the first major addition to the standard C++ library. The implementation includes a number of important features in VC++ language such as smart pointers, regular expression parsing, new containers (tuple, array, unordered set, etc.), sophisticated random number generators, polymorphic function wrappers, type traits and more.
If you are interested in Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition then you can easily download it and install the beta version. You have two options to download and install Visual C++ IDE. Either web install which will automatically download the VC++ Express which will automatically download and install the software. Or another option is to download an ISO image file with is the complete installation package.
You can read the Performance Improvements in Visual C++ and also read the MFC update where you can also comment on new Visual C++ 8. You can learn C++ programming as a .NET developer. These two tutorials will help you in starting C++ as a .NET Developer. Part 1 – Part 2