If you missed the GoingNative 2012 conference then the good news is that it isn't too late. Microsoft has made available all of the sessions as videos. If you only have time to watch one, then make it the talk that opened the conference by the creator of C++, Bjarne Stroustrup.
We know how to write bad code: litter our programs with casts, macros, pointers, naked new and deletes, and complicated control structures. Alternatively (or additionally), we could obscure every design decision in a mess of deeply nested abstractions using the latest object-oriented programming and...
The C++11 standard introduces threads into the language, and carefully defines the meaning of variables shared between threads. The design is based on the idea that meaningful multithreaded programs should, by default, behave as though threads were executed in simple interleaved fashion....
The C++ Standard Library expanded and evolved massively between C++98/03 and C++11. It's easy to forget the magnitude of these changes, because they happened gradually and sometimes invisibly.
Variadic templates are arguably the most profound change in the core language brought about by C++11. Curiously, however, the C++ community still tiptoes carefully around them: variadic templates enjoyed less coverage than features such as "auto" or lambdas.
Day 2 Keynote - Herb Sutter: C++11, VC++11 and Beyond This talk will covers the key features in C++11 that will most change the way you write code: the features that directly affect C++ style, coding idioms, and the guidance in pre-C++11 books and articles that most needs to be updated.
Were we to craft a Lenox Globe of programming languages, C++ might be followed by a famous cautionary phrase: Here Be Dragons. The language can be complex and daunting to programmers who are often shouldered with the task of writing large, complex programs.
All right, the C++11 Standard is done. Can we go home? Definitely not - progress waits for no one. For all its might, C++11 is not addressing a few basic needs in template programming.
C++ does not provide facilities for directly expressing what a function template requires of its set of parameters. This is a problem that manifests itself as poor error messages, obscure bugs, lack of proper overloading, poor specification of interfaces, and maintenance problems.
Interactive Panel: Ask Us Anything! Herb Sutter, Bjarne Stroustrup, Andrei Alexandrescu, Stephan T. Lavavej,Andrew Sutton, Chandler Carruth, Hans Boehm
All of the videos are interesting and the only questions are will there be a repeat next year and why exactly did Microsoft feel the need to throw such an event for C++?
Presumably the anwsers will be revealed in time, but without a doubt it is C++ that is on the rise at Microsoft and C# is starting to look like an orphan.
This year's Octoverse Report reveals how AI is expanding on GitHub and that Python has now overtaken JavaScript as the most popular language on GitHub. The use of Jupyter Notebooks has also surged.