Did you ever asked yourself how people do add this nice looking Office 2007 visual styles in combination with a ribbon control to their projects? I did and I found out that Microsoft released a “Feature Pack for Visual C++ 08” lately which exactly contains what I mentioned above.

The installer that comes with the download adds a couple of new options to the MFC project building wizard of Visual C++ 2008. It’s now possible to choose between different styles (Office 07, Visual Studio 05,…) and color schemes. Last but not least, it’s possible to use a ribbon instead of a classic menu bar.

Right after the wizard, an automatically generated example project appears on the screen which shows the basic features of the pack. It contains comments added by the creator for describing all the new functions.

The lesson is clear: Microsoft finally came up with a userfrendly and good looking addition for Visual C++ 2008 which makes it possible to develop high qualitative graphical user interfaces in no time.

Today, I found out that Microsoft provides a 90-day trial version of their new Visual Studio. The file size averages 3,3 GB and it can be directly downloaded from their website with highspeed.

If you want to use the Visual Studio without limitation, just get yourself a valid key. There are some on the web, but I won’t go in detial here because it’s illegal. People with some web knowledge may find one without my help.

This is what you get
- Visual C# 2008
- Visual C++ 2008
- Visual Basic 2008
- Visual Web Developer 2008

In addition
- Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5
- Microsoft Crystal Report Basic For Visual Studio 2008
- Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition

I didn’t test it yet because I’m downloading right now, but others told me that it runs without any problems so far.

Get Visual Studio 2008 Prof. 90-day Trial: Download