Microsoft Game Developer Days 2010
Visual C++ 2010: A Turbo Boost in Productivity
The editor has been rewritten from the ground-up, and it has a new "blue" look to it.
One new feature is the ability to easily set your project to v9 mode, which will use the previous compiler and tools. so you can migrate to 2010 at your own speed.
The editor is extensible as always, but it now has an extension manager that lets you load up prepackaged extensions to the IDE.
For MFC users, the MFC class wizard from Visual Studio 6 has returned. But since this is a game conference, they didn't dwell on that.
Intellisense has been rewritten from the ground-up. It worked on small projects, but it didn't scale very well. The new version uses SQL at the back-end and can do fuzzy searches to find classes and members.
MSBuild has a new set of very verbose diagnostics. They were designed for them as much as you, as their own build process was very involved and hard to debug. As an example, they added a file to a build that had a modified-date that's in the future. Normally that would trip up the build system, forcing the file to always build. The new build now warns of stuff like that.
VC++ implements as much of the (not yet ratified) C++ 0x standard as has been signed off on. The example showed r-value references (the && operator), which allows objects to "move" rather than copy more efficiently, implementing a "move constructor", ala a copy constructor, eliminating extraneous copies of objects when you want to, for example, swap values.
Intellisense if pretty-much everywhere now. It'll even suggest include files that are available to it.
One new thing in the C++ 0x standard is "lambda expressions". This allows you to do things with non-functions that used to require functions. The example shown was putting a for-loop in a chunk of concurrently running code. Seems like a nice little streamline for little trivial bits of code that you want to run concurrently but aren't consequential enough to deserve their own function.
