Last night in Dave Platt's class, Stan Lippman was the guest speaker.  I only have one word - wow!  It was a great talk.  He gave us an overview of the alphabet soup CLI, CLR, CLS, CIL etc.  Since I am learning C++ in my spare time (always looking for any suggestions in this), the talk really, really helped me.  Why you might ask? 

Since I started showing an interest in C++ in the last year, I have had ALOT of people tell me “Don't bother”... but yet I still want to learn.  What Stan presented last night leads me to believe that the next release (VS.Net 2005) is going to bring “a heater and some serious smelling salts” (think Good Will Hunting) to C++ ---- and bring it back to life.  I even got a Beta disk of the next version (had Stan autograph it for me).  It was great to meet someone who is on the “Who's Who” list of C++, convince me that I should bother... keep going and learn it - because it is not dead (or soon will be brought back to life anyways).

The next version of C++ (Visual C++.Net that is) is going to introduce some things to .Net that you can only do in C++...  So if you are a C++ programmer and are wondering what is next for your career -> I would suggest getting a Beta of the next version and being the one person in your company to lead the pack into the .Net world (that is if your company hasn't drank the koolaid yet).