If you're an MFC developer for Windows, your applications won't have to look like they were made for Windows 95 anymore. The final edition of the latest VC++ Feature Pack enables you to replace your toolbars with the Office ribbon.

Up until recently, the main evolutionary emphasis in Windows programming has been towards its Presentation Foundation (WPF), which emphasize distributed components and the .NET model. But the traditional Windows programming model, using Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), has lived on. And it hasn't exactly languished, either: MFC programming, where traditional DLL resources are packaged into a more monolithic distribution, is still a dominant discipline for many enterprises' in-house developers.

Yesterday, the old model of programming took its own evolutionary step forward, with the release of an otherwise non-self-descript add-on called the Visual C++ Feature Pack. With a bountiful collection of new libraries -- including contributions from one of history's most influential programmers, P. J. Plauger -- developers who continue to use the MFC model will now be able to develop Windows applications that use such graphical features as the ribbon tool (as seen in Microsoft Office 2007), pre-defined visual style templates, and completely refreshed common controls such as dialog boxes and graphic objects that you'd normally find with WPF.

As the company's development division chief S. Somasegar wrote for the release of the first Feature Pack beta in January, "Using the new MFC library, developers will be able to create applications that feature the 'look and feel' of Microsoft's most popular products, including Office, Internet Explorer and Visual Studio."

So the Ribbon Control is now a "real control" from the vantage point of the veteran Windows developer, who's accustomed to using Forms controls (with a capital "F") for placing resources within a dialog box.

The main implication of this is that businesses' "legacy" applications, which are established and well-written for as long as a decade and which those businesses aren't willing to completely replace just to use WPF, will now be able to have the feel of newly created applications that take full advantage of Windows Vista.

Two years ago, Microsoft made the decision to license its Office UI "look and feel" to developers for free, but only so long as they agree to abide by certain behavioral guidelines. MFC already has its own licensing scheme for redistribution that doesn't have such strict behavioral guidelines, which may mean that Microsoft has chosen not to appear the "enforcer" with regard to a visual style it created. Worldwide, the verdict on the viability of the Ribbon look and feel remains mixed.

The latest Feature Pack also includes some of the most substantial changes and improvements to the core C++ library in over a decade. Officially called the TR19768 C++ Library Extensions, they're typically referred to by the shorthand "TR1" (Technical Report 1).

Specifically, Microsoft licensed its version of TR1 directly from Dinkumware, the principal commercial license body for the C++ Standard Library, and the current home of P. J. Plauger who helped create the C programming language.

One of TR1's most praised new features is called a shared pointer, which is a handle that points to a dynamically created object. C++ has had similar handles before, but this particular kind can clean up after the object to which it points. The idea here is that an object without handles is pointless, so when the last handle to an object becomes undefined or goes out of scope, the object itself is destroyed -- which means, its destructor is activated.

That spruces up memory, and that in turn makes programs run better. Just as importantly, the pointer may be shared by multiple concurrent threads without incident.

Another feature Visual C++ programmers will appreciate is TR1's radically improved and expedited methodology for handling regex regular expressions, which are used in pattern matching operations -- most often, with text searches.

"In general, TR1 Regex is as fast or faster than Boost.Regex 1.35.0," wrote Visual C++ libraries developer Stephan Lavaveg yesterday, referring to a competitor's brand of commercial C++ libraries. "TR1 Regex is still slower than Boost for some regexes, such as those dominated by alternations like 'cute|fluffy|kittens', but their performance has also improved significantly compared to the Feature Pack Refresh. Further performance improvements are being investigated for VC10."