Visual Studio 2010

I am very excited about the Visual Studio 2010 release. Why would I be so excited about a compiler release? I guess because I'm that nerdy. Ok, it's a little more than that. This new compiler release has some real benefits for Opticks.

Easier Deployment - right now Opticks deployment is complicated by Visual Studio's insistence on manifests and use of the windows side by side cache. This insistence complicates user level installs (e.g. without admin privileges) and wreaks havoc when they push a new Visual Studio patch out. But, all of this goes away with Visual Studio 2010. They have seen the errors of their ways and are reverting to the deployment used with Visual Studio 6. Yeah!

Faster - Visual Studio 2010 is including a new feature in the next C++ standard, R-value references. You don't need to care about and I don't need to either. But what you will care about is when applied to STL, they provide an order of magnitude speed up. We use a lot of STL in Opticks, so I expect some noticeable speed-up.

Needless to say, can't wait until Visual Studio 2010 gets released. And yes we are planning on upgrading to use Visual Studio 2010 for the Opticks 4.4.X line.

Google Summer of Code

Woot! Opticks has been accepted into Google Summer of Code 2010 as a mentoring organization. I'm very excited and the interest we've had from students already is amazing. It's going to be a very good summer. I've been looking forward to this for 2 years, we applied last year but weren't accepted.

I will say I find this year's summer of code very interesting because there seem to be a good number of other scientific software packages. Might just be me, but this is pretty cool.