Everything seems to be moving to .NET and VC++ seems to be adding a
lot of managed code support every new release.
The questions: is unmanaged code in VC++ beeing phased out in favour
of managed code?
Unmanaged code isn't going away any time soon. Until we get microprocessors
that implement the CLR in silicon, it's fair to say that native code
generation will be around. It's probably safe to assume that it will have a
diminishing role, at least on Windows systems, but there's still so much
functionality that's not provided by the CLR/BCL/etc. that it'll be quite
some time before a significant number of mainstream Windows apps are fully
managed code, IMO.
And suppose I still program in VC++ 6.0, can I safely assume that the
code I use in VC++ 6.0 will still be available in future VC++
versions.
You can certainly continue to program with VC6. Note that VC7, VC7.1 and
the upcoming Visual Studio 2005 ("VC8") also support native code generation.
Whether the code you use in VC6 will "be available" in future VC++ depends
on the code. For example, many (ill-formed) programs compile with VC6 that
won't compile with VC7.1. You won't necessarily be able to reuse your VC6
code in a later version without recompiling it, and you might have to make
changes to the code to recompile it, but in general yes - you'll still be
able to use your existing code in future VC++ for the forseeable future.
Finally will VC++ 6.0 generated executables be still be able to run
on futur Windows versions and service packs?
It seems likely that at some point VC6 generated executables will no longer
be supported. That's mostly up to the platform SDK folks to decide. If at
some point new required features are added to the platform SDK for some
future version of Windows and the platform SDK drops support for VC6...
well, you get the idea. It'll be a while before anything like that happens,
I'd imagine.
-cd
