Folks, those of us writing managed code in here should be really grateful. I know because on the weekend I tried to resurrect some of my C++ library code that has been untouched since 2003. Well ... everything has changed thanks to the security review, Unicode, new standard libraries, language features and compilers. It took me hours to get the old code modernised to compile, but then I ran into incomprehensible linker errors that I still haven't solved. So I'm not there yet.
Then this morning I had to prove to a colleague who only writes C++ that Azure Storage was usable from C++ programs without too much suffering because I expected and hoped that helper libraries would be available. I found good sample articles here <https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/storage-c-plus-plus-how-to-use-blobs> and here <https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/storage-c-plus-plus-how-to-use-blobs>, and I eventually made a simple working sample, but it was hell. The namespaces are unfamiliar, the iterators are cryptic, there are new magic string macros, but worst of all is asynchrony via the pplx library. In managed code we can just await or let! bind for asynchrony, and the language syntax is short and clear. I still haven't managed to get a single async C++ function call to work yet. I was hoping that after all these years, and with the trend to "modern C++" that things would be better, and I'm sure they are once you get the hang of it, but the change in style, libraries, language and compilers makes your 20th century C/C++ code experience mostly obsolete. Now I really appreciate how lucky we are writing C# and F#. Here endeth the post Easter sermon. *Greg K*
