Re: MFC future?
- From: Daniel James <wastebasket@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2005 12:27:58 GMT
In article news:<uqFbguCAGHA.3804@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Mike Goldweber
wrote:
> So, what is the best way to produce dialog based apps using a C++
> language?
I use MFC. Using either/both VC6 and VS2003 (and VS2005 beta). A number of
my clients have not upgraded from VC6 to VS2003 (for various reasons) so I
still have to use VC6 some of the time. VS2003 has a better C++ compiler
but the IDE in 2003 is not as productive for C++ (especially MFC)
applications.
I don't write dialog-based apps, though. I write SDI doc/view applications
based around a CFormView. These look fairly like dialogs but have several
advantages (file support, toolbars, status bar, etc.). I write the GUI code
using MFC, but I write the back-end code using standard C++ (with nothing
Microsoft-specific) so it is easy to port to other systems. It is good
design to make a clear separation between application logic and user
interface code, and this practice enforces that.
> My last job used Borland Builder to produce dialogs, and
> that was great fun.
Borland's C++ Builder and Delphi tools make prototyping a GUI using the
supplied VCL components very quick and painless, but I have always found
that the job gets much harder as soon as you need to do something that you
can't do with a ready-made component out of the box. Some aspects of the
VCL (such as data-aware controls) can be very powerful in simple apps, but
introduce unwanted relationships between application logic and GUI code and
can be a source of unnecessary complexity in larger apps. Overall I find
MFC at least as productive.
> I'm relatively new to building gui's with MFC, but after reading some of
> the comments here, I'm not so sure this is a good use of my time?
It depends what you want to do/are called upon to do. MFC is still
Microsoft's best and only tool for programming native-code C++ applications
for Windows.
If you want to write managed .NET applications (rather than native code)
you can still use C++ (especially if you're using VS2005) but you will
probably use Windows Forms instead of MFC. There are reasons to want to use
Forms, and reasons not to.
If you want to target non-windows systems such as linux or the Mac you
shouldn't use MFC, but should look instead at one of the cross-platform
toolkits such as Qt (commercial) or wxWidgets (Open Source). wxWidgets also
targets Windows CE (or whatever it's called today) which MFC doesn't.
> My new company just converted to Visual Studio .Net
> 2003. If this set of tools has a better method of making user
> interfaces, I'm all of devoting my time to learning that.
MFC is one of the tools provided in VS 2003, so your company's choice
doesn't restrict you (though, as I said, many of us feel that the VC6 IDE
was easier to use).
Cheers,
Daniel.
.
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