# Monday, 12 March 2012
It's been a week-and-a-bit that the beta of Visual Studio 11 has been out. I'm using it more than Visual Studio 2010 at the moment - in both Windows 7 and Windows 8, and for C++ projects exclusively at the moment. (Say what you will about the C++ Renaissance, but the fraction of my consulting, writing, and coding that is C++ has taken a major uptick in the last  6 or so months.) I'm getting used to the look, and I'm certainly motivated to use more keyboard shortcuts :-)

Herb has a nice blog post that summarizes the C++ features in this release. You can read the details there, I'll just summarize briefly:
  • Complete Standard Library for C++ 11. Especially the async and threads stuff. Standard!
  • Some more language C++ 11 features. Range for is the big one here.
  • C++ AMP. You know I care about this one!
  • The continuation (.then) syntax of PPL, which makes WinRT asynchronicity much more readable.
  • Windows 8 - both C++/CX and WinRL

And there will be more coming, sooner than "Visual Studio 12" whenever that might be. There will be out of band releases with more goodies as they get finished. If you care what gets done (and released) in what order, you can tell the team. I took the survey myself - I care about uniform initialization, defaulted constructors, and then some other bits and pieces at lower priority. Since they aren't just going to gather them all up and release them a few years from now, order matters. Share your opinion, and you're more likely to get what you want.

Monday, 12 March 2012 11:09:18 (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #