Microsoft is offering the beta version of its Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack, enabling development of applications with the look and feel of popular Microsoft products, Microsoft’s S. “Soma” Somasegar said in his blog Tuesday.The Feature Pack extends Visual C++ libraries that shipped with Visual Studio 2008. That product first shipped in November.Somasegar, corporate vice president of the company’s Developer Division, said the beta release features a major update to Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) and an implementation of the TR1 (Technical Report 1) library. TR1 specifies additions to the C++ library. “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. With the TR1 library, developers gain access to a number of important features such as smart pointers, regular expression parsing and new container classes,” Somasegar said. Some of the new capabilities include support for development of applications with the Office Ribbon-style interface and the Office 2007, Office 2003 and Office XP look and feel. The feature pack is downloadable here. Software Development