Microsoft has released Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack Beta

The VC++ 2008 MFC libraries have been extended to support creation of applications that have:

Office Ribbon style interface
Office 2007, Office 2003 and Office XP look and feel
Modern Visual Studio-style docking toolbars and panes
Fully customizable toolbars and menus
A rich set of advanced GUI controls
Advanced MDI tabs and groups
And much more!

This feature pack also includes an implementation of TR1. Portions of TR1 are scheduled for adoption in the upcoming C++0x standard as the first major addition to the ISO 2003 standard C++ library. Our implementation includes a number of important features such as:

Smart pointers
Regular expression parsing
New containers (tuple, array, unordered set, etc)
Sophisticated random number generators
Polymorphic function wrappers
Type traits
And more!

Note: This feature pack does not include C99 compatibility or support for special math functions.

VC++ 2008 Libraries Feature Pack Beta