Hi,

My name is Pranish Kumar and I work on the Visual C++ Libraries
Team. I wanted to make a posting that would hopefully answer many of
the questions people have asked about WTL. We appreciate feedback on
the message, particularly in what you would like to see happen with
WTL, for example how many of you would be interested in supporting
it as an open source project?

WTL has had an unusual time in Microsoft. It was shipped as an
unsupported sample in the Platform SDK, a state in which it has
remained. Over the years a user-base has built up around WTL, with
support being provided through non-standard channels.

Many WTL users ask us why we don't support WTL as an official
Microsoft product. There are a number of issues with this, but one
of the major ones is the work required to make WTL an official,
supported product. WTL requires documentation to be written from
scratch, the creation of a complete test suite and testing harness,
and the addition of knowledgeable support personnel to the Microsoft
official support channels. There would also likely be significant
changes to the library itself as we moved it forward to the latest
version of ATL and the compiler.

The cost of doing this work is several-fold, firstly it would likely
take up all the ATLMFC team resources for a full release to complete
this upgrade. The only visible differences for WTL users would be
Microsoft support and documentation as well as some bug fixes, for
existing ATLMFC users there would be no new features.

Because almost every WTL user we talk to today is extremely happy
with the library, and because of the importance of continuing to
develop ATLMFC, we do not think that productizing WTL is the best
use of our resources. WTL has solved problems for a portion of VC++
customers through its current release mechanism, this makes it
difficult to justify spending the significant effort required to
make it a supported product. Also the WTL community would need to
realize the disadvantages as well as the advantages of having a
productized WTL, some issues that come to mind include frequency of
releases, bug fixing process and working through official support
channels.

Having said this, the ATLMFC team is always looking to support our
customers in the best way possible, if it turns out that there is an
increased need amongst existing ATLMFC customers for WTL, or that
there is a way to productize WTL without incurring the large
overhead, then we would definitely reconsider our position.

Related to this the team is investigating various ways that we can
improve the experience for WTL users without incurring the
prohibitive overhead. Some of the possibilities we are investigating
include modifying the licensing for WTL so that the WTL community
could support itself with a shared-source project.

The ATLMFC and smart devices teams are also working closely together
to provide a better solution for our customers. In the next release
of Visual Studio, native c++ development for smart devices will be
integrated into the Visual Studio shell. The devices team is also
investigating what role WTL will play in the eVC space.

Hopefully this answers most of your questions and concerns, expect
to hear more from the Visual C++ team on where we are going with the
language and libraries in the not too distant future.

Thanks,

Pranish Kumar
pranishk@...