Microsoft’s C++ team is working on a “significant” update to the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), enabling developers to build applications with the look and feel of Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer and Visual Studio, a Microsoft executive said in a recent blog.“We will be delivering this as an update to Visual Studio 2008 in the first half of 2008,” said S. “Soma” Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division. “We will have a preview of the same sometime around the early part of the new year.”The Visual Studio 2008 software development platform is due to ship by the end of this month. Some specific features of the MFC update include the Microsoft Office 2007 Ribbon bar look, Internet Explorer look with rebars and task panes and the Visual Studio look with sophisticated docking functionality, Somasegar said. “You can also enable your users to customize your application through live drag and drop of menu items and toolbar buttons,” he said.Also planned is support for Technical Report 1 (TR1), which is a draft document specifying additions to the C++ Library such as regular expressions and random number generators. Software Development