Jeroen’s weblog

Wednesday is also shaping up to be an interesting day at TechEd. After meeting up with Wolfgang Manousek, a Microsoft developer that actually lives in Germany (I didn’t know that was possible!) early in the morning to talk about XML and its relation to the new SQLServer, I attended Herb Sutter’s session on the future of C++ and .NET entitled “Visual C++ 2005: New Language Design and Enhancements”

I originally didn’t plan to go to any C++ sessions, since I’ve mostly switched to C# nowadays, but after seeing all this stuff I have to admit I might consider having a look at C++ in the VS.NET 2005 beta. There was a lot of emphasis on combining traditional C++ features such as templates and the ability to do incredibly cool stuff that totally destroys your application if a single scenario shows up you never considered along with doing everything .NET has to offer, such as garbage collecting and generics. What I liked especially was the way destructors/finalizers/disposing are done in the upcoming Visual C++ 2005, although I’ll have to look at the slides a couple of times and try the VS.NET 2005 beta before I fully grasp how these things relate. But the idea of mapping your delete statements to a generated dispose method sounds excellent. Especially since I’ve recently been having a more or less conceptual struggle with IDisposable. I’m not entirely sure if these things are avoided in C++’s new approach, but I guess I’ll find out shortly.

After that I went to see Ingo Rammer at the Ask The Experts stand in the exhibition hall. We had a very interesting conversation about remoting and application domains. What I especially appreciate is his ability to start up his laptop and illustrate what he’s explaining in more or less actual code without any preparation. I’ve seen him do this during last monday evening’s presentation at the DotNed usergroup as well, but wasn’t sure whether that was part of his presentation.