C++/CX – keeping C++/CLI syntactically alive

As most of you already know by now, the C++ Component Extensions (or just C++/CX) introduced in Visual C++ 11 will basically use the C++/CLI syntax with minor differences. Someone asked me on Code Project what I thought of that and I replied to him, (paraphrasing here) – “Years of using an unpopular syntax to code in C++ is finally going to pay off”. I also believe that the very reason we are getting intellisense for C++/CLI now is that they had to do that for C++/CX anyway, so they (as in the VC++ team) may well have thought they’d do it for C++/CLI as well. Obviously while there are syntactic similarities, they do target entirely different data/code/memory models – so that has to be kept in mind. One of them is for garbage collected .NET while the other is for ref-counted native code/COM (WinRT). I will be blogging more on C++/CX here in the next few weeks/months. So if anyone’s interested in that stuff, stay tuned.

Read Full Post »