# Slow Chat Archives > Slow Chat: Visual C++: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow >  [RESOLVED] What's the features/inovations expected for Orcas

## Sygnosys

I don't know if it's VC++ team can answer this question, but here it goes anyway.
VC++ 8.0 brought some nice features/innovations where I want to distinguish C++/CLI, PGO and OpenMP. So what can we expect in terms of features for the VC++ Orcas release?

The one that already was discussed on previous posts, is the update of VC++ libraries to Vista, what else?

Kind Regards
Cláudio Albuquerque

----------


## joncaves

I can answer for the compiler: mostly we are just fixing a lot of bugs. Most of the bugs we have fixed (and will fix - we are not done yet) are issues that customers raised on the MSDN Feedback site. After all the changes in Visual C++ 2005 we felt that our users might enjoy a release which they could pick up without running the risk of having to fix of lot of issues in their code.

----------


## steixeira

It's still too early to talk about a lot of specifics, but I can say that the general theme of the Orcas release is to enable developers to build applications that leverage the platform capabilities of Windows Vista, .NET 3.0, and Office 2007.  Libraries work, as you mentioned, is an important part of our Vista support strategy.  Also important is a high level of compatibility with VS 2005 projects and a very high level of quality.  Orcas will almost certainly be a "smaller" VC++ release in terms of new features as compared to VC++ 2005, as we're working on bigger, longer lead features in parallel that will ship in the post-Orcas timeframe.

Thanks,

Steve Teixeira
Group Program Manager
Visual C++

----------


## Sygnosys

Thanks for the replies.

I will be somewhat bold and make some ideas/opinions regarding features for the Orcas release. And just for the record Im a true believer that resources and time are finite. 

IMHO not supporting XAML (http://www.codeguru.com/forum/showthread.php?t=391029) it somewhat brings the idea of VC++ being a legacy code tool. It also somewhat penalizes the adoption of VC++ for building new applications.
Again in my IMHO, it gives out the impression that VC++ is one release behind the other languages (VB and VC#).  

On the other hand, I would love and it would be more useful for me the support of LINQ (http://www.codeguru.com/forum/showthread.php?t=391413). But IMHO I think that the XAML support has a bigger demand from the masses.

A suggestion of improvement would be in the field what was discussed in this thread (http://www.codeguru.com/forum/showthread.php?t=391068). For example, when I started using the WMI stuff provided in ATL the little documentation provided and the lack of samples, made this task somewhat interesting.

Although Im still a faithful user of CreateThread in my real applications
Ive been playing around with the OpenMP and although its not perfect I think the idea looks very nice. Do you think there will be some improvements here?

Finally in one of my lastest projects I tried to use the CLI/C++ CodeDOM and found it to be broken. Just to get it out of the way I could not use C# because I need support for what MSDN calls "C++ Bit Fields".
So my question will CodeDOM be fixed, if so will it support this type of construct?

Thanks again

----------


## steixeira

Regarding the Orcas release in general: we are already executing on our development plan.  At this point, it would be very difficult for us to schedule any new Orcas features.  As I mentioned in another thread, Orcas will have fewer new features for VC++ developers than VS 2005, and this is by design: we're working on features with much greater impact and value in parallel, but the timing is such that they don't fit in Orcas.

On XAML: C++/CLI support for XAML-based designers his is something we really tried to fit into Orcas.  Unfortunately, you won't see this in Orcas, but we are laying some of the groundwork to enable this scenario in a future release.  I agree with you than not having this feature in Orcas could send a message we're not intending to send, so I need to emphasize that XAML support is in our long term plans -- it's just not something we could fit in Orcas.

On LINQ: LINQ is certainly an interesting and important technology, but LINQ scenarios are not yet a scenarios we are targeting for VC++.  But we're keeping an eye on it, and LINQ may be something we choose to support later.  It's interesting to note that there is actually some alignment between language features needed for LINQ and language features planned for the next C++ standard, such as automatic type inference and lambda expressions.

On documentation: I agree... we need to be better, and we continue to try.

On multi-threaded development: With the hardware trend toward multi-core and Many-core CPUs, it has become a high priority for Microsoft to devise new programming models for development of highly parallel software.  OpenMP is today's parallel programming model, but we're looking at a lot of options here.

On the CodeDOM: Part of the longer lead work we're doing involves improving technology related to CodeDOM.

Thanks!

Steve Teixeira
Group Program Manager
Visual C++

----------

