With the release of a new feature pack for Visual C++ 2008, developers can now write applications that feature the Office 2007 appearance, a Microsoft senior executive announced this week. At the same time, the company also discontinued support for its aging Visual Basic 6 integrated development environment, or IDE — to the dismay of some die-hard users.

LINQ To SQL is one of the most promising technologies that appeared lately in .NET programming. Since it became available developers using .Net have no need to mix code with SQL commands within the application to access database objects.

Mike Murach and Associates has just published a 2008 edition of their core Visual Basic book, entitled Murach’s Visual Basic 2008. It teaches how to develop Windows forms applications the way the best professionals do. To do that, it incorporates the features that have made earlier editions such popular choices among developers.

Mindscape has released their second WPF product offering - WPF Elements. WPF Elements is a suite of 12 controls to aid in the rapid development of WPF line-of-business applications by providing controls that end users would expect.

vsTODOlist is a Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 language extension that allows you to implement to-do lists for your development projects using color coding and Intellisense.