Microsoft announces Visual C++ 6.0

Microsoft Corporation announced Visual C++ 6.0, the final component of itsupcoming Visual Studio 6.0 suite, due to debut in September. Visual C++adds new features while retaining the Integrated Development Environment(IDE) of the 5.0 release, easing developer transition. That's a nice way ofsaying that Microsoft still hasn't delivered on the common development environment for Visual Studio that the company promised last year. Still,Visual C++ offers enough new Internet and enterprise development featuresthat most hardcore developers will want to come along for the ride.

"The development team has taken Visual C++ to the next level," said Paul Gross, vice president of developer tools at Microsoft. "Visual C++ 6.0 delivers on productivity never thought possible with C++ and, at the sametime, improves performance and lets developers retain full control of theircode."

Which is, of course, a marketing way of saying that the word "Visual" inthe product's title isn't meant to be taken literally: There's nothing very"visual" about Visual C++. This is too bad, really, because tools likeVisual InterDev and Visual J++ have gotten quite a bit more visual in 6.0than they were previously, but Microsoft's C++ product is lagging behind inthis category.

Where Visual C++ doesn't lag behind, however, is speed. Visual C++ isnotably faster than previous releases, which were already best-of-class.Microsoft says that it has improved compiler throughput by as much as 30%on large projects and 15% on smaller projects.

Other new features in Visual C++ include the IntelliSense technology firstseen in Visual Basic, and "Edit and Continue" debugging. Visual C++ willdebut with the rest of Visual Studio 6.0 on September 2, 1998