Hello,
Yesterday, February 12th, Autodesk has officially announced its 2009 product line.
Read more about here:
http://www.worldpressdays08.com/pages/page.cfm?action=products&sub1=1
AutoCAD 2009 (codename Raptor) will implement several new features like these major ones:
– View Cube (easy 3D view);
– Steering Wheel (easy 3D navigation);
– Office like Ribbon interface;
– Menu Browser;
– Action recorder;
– Geographic location;
– Modeless Layer manager (works now like a toolpallete);
There are much more and you may find these detailed features soon at Autodesk website.
My friend, Shaan Hurley, have a more detailed list at his Blog:
http://autodesk.blogs.com/between_the_lines/2008/02/the-2009-produc.html
Regarding to programming aspects, AutoCAD 2009 is backward compatible with 2007 and 2008. This way an application compiled with ObjectARX 2007 will be able to run inside all these 3 versions.
Actually, AutoCAD 2009 was built using VS2005 Service Pack 1 but if you plan to keep your project backward compatible it is recommended to use VS2005 without Service Pack.
Probably the next version of AutoCAD will break the binary compatibility with 2007,2008 and 2009 and will use VS2008. Autodesk seems to be aligned with Microsoft Visual Studio evolution and will try to make only binary compatibility break on every 3 releases.
Cheers!