Herb Sutter joins Microsoft. Herb is a recognised C++ luminary and his hiring may indicate how much Microsoft values C++ still. [via Sam]

I certainly hope that C# will be the destination of choice for a lot of today's Visual Basic application developers. That would be quite a step forward. For systems programming, C++ is still tough to beat despite all the naysayers' wishful thinking that C++ will just roll over and go away. Even in its first incarnation, Managed C++ is the best .NET programming language for creating efficient, performance-oriented applications, and Managed C++ will continue to be improved to increase its overlap with Standard C++.