Well, Microsoft has released its free Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack for download — including a major update to MFC and an implementation of TR1 which includes smart pointers, regular expressions, containers and better random number generators.

The update to MFC is a fairly major overhaul, and includes components which provide the L&F(Look And Feel) of IE, Office 2007 (including the ribbon bar), Visual Studio (including Visual Studio docking and autohide windows), with support for Vista themes, and on-the-fly customization of toolbars and menus, according to Somasegar. The list goes on, and it honestly left me feeling conflicted — I mean, now that MFC has joined us in the 21st century, I’m almost tempted to actually use it …