Re: Future of MFC?

From:

David Wilkinson <no-reply@effisols.com>

Newsgroups:

microsoft.public.vc.mfc

Date:

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 09:43:16 -0400

Message-ID:

<ex$mz5R$HHA.5464@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl>

Ajay Kalra wrote:

"Jonathan Wood" <jwood@softcircuits.com> wrote in message
news:uh43sTN$HHA.5980@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...

Ajay,

IMO, MFC has limited upside, if at all. I am kind of shocked that
MSFT is doing those enhancements to MFC. In my view, thats complete
waste of resources. No one in their right mind is going to use C++ in
.Net. Its just too expensive, hard to maintain and good help is hard
to find.

I suspect that enhancements geared towards using C++ with .NET are for
the purpose of trying to move more developers to the .NET platform.

I'd never program for .NET with C++, but I'm pretty sure some folks
would.

I just dont see it. Its not practical. Its highly unlikely that existing
C++ apps would embrace .Net. New apps which may want these features dont
need to use C++. To be fair, I think a good chunk of new functionality
is not .Net related. But I think its too late in the cycle for it.
Around 6 years ago, MSFT had decided to do nothing with MFC. IMO, this
is one of those times but they should continue to support it with each
new vs release.

Ajay, the fact is that, for whatever reason, a significant fraction of
those that used MFC in VC6 are still doing native-only coding. Since
they are major purchasers of Visual Studio, shouldn't the product do
something for them?

You mention existing MFC apps embracing .NET. There is something that is
not talked about very much, which is CWinFormsView and CWinFormsDialog,
which enable you to use WinForms as views or dialogs in MFC
applications. Does anybody use this technology? I have played with it
(in Orcas) and it works as advertised. One example (which is what I
tried): you can use the DataGridView control in MFC.

For me, a major downside is I would have to give up static linking, and
complicate my distribution with MFC/CRT DLL's and the .NET runtime.

--
David Wilkinson
Visual C++ MVP

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