With the debut of the .NET, the Visual C++ team was forced to deal with three different programming models: native, managed, and mixed. This is not a situation faced by either the VB or C# teams...nor did we have to deal with this up to and including VC6. To advance the product on all of these fronts we had to make some tough feature decisions. You correctly pointed out that we focused the last several versions on trying to provide a good .NET experience for C++ developers. Since this was "the new thing" it made sense to skew this way. But due to the inherent differences between the design of the CLR and the design of the C++ language...this has been difficult work. As a result, we haven't been able to advance the product (esp around native code) as much as we would have liked to. This is not to say that there were no native code enhancements. In the past few versions we have added a variety of IDE productivity enhancements, Whole Program Optimization, Profile Guided Optimization, /GS to guard against stack buffer overflow, SafeCRT, native 64-bit targeting, etc. That said, we recognize that more work on native code development must be done. Your posts to the chat further confirm that this is something we need to address. Native code is still vitally important to Microsoft and in future versions we do plan to advance the state of the art.

As to your question about "achieving the same results" with native C++ as you can with .NET...this distills down to a productivity issue. .NET development involves a tacit trade-off of run time control for developer productivity. So while you gain productivity you must also deal with the limitations enforced by the CLR. With native C++, on the other hand, you have the complete power and performance of the platform (HW and SW) at your command. The trade-off with native is that developers must deal with greater design-time complexity. The bottom line is that .NET development will always be faster than writing native code. Yes...we need to do more to make native C++ development better, faster and cheaper. We hear you. But it is not likely that you'll ever get the same programming productivity benefits in native as you get with .NET development.

Bill Dunlap
Program Manager
Visual C++