Gareth Simpson

The Visual Studio 2005 Express range looks mighty impressive. I might even be tempted to give C# or VB.NET a spin. The big dissapointment though is that the C++ flavour will not include MFC or ATL. Great. That’s a real encouragement for C++ hobbyists to start writing for the Windows platform, absolutely no framework support. It’s sad but true. The VS Express line is a driver for .NET, not Windows. Hopefully the talk on the WTL mailing list suggesting that they break the dependancy on ATL will get around this problem, but even if that happens, that won’t be for ages. MS should seriously consider shipping ATL at least.

From the WTL mailing list: Hi everybody, An idea of making WTL independent of ATL was going around for a while. I would like to know what is your opinion on this subject. Personally I’d be over the moon about this. WTL is a superb C++ GUI library and removing it’s ATL shackles can only be a good thing. The ATL link is historic – a leg up for WTL – and keeping it now isn’t helping anyone. WTL compiled on Borland or even GCC/MinGW anyone?