Re: Future of MFC?
"Daniel James" <wastebasket@nospam.aaisp.org> wrote in message
news:VA.000011a2.01b573bf@nospam.aaisp.org...
If I correctly understand the point you're making ... that's a feature of
the way the control is written rather than of the language or framework
that's targeted by the designer. MFC could have high-level designer tools
that lots of things automagically, but .NET does have some advantage over
native, here, because of the type information that a .NET component
publishes along with its callable interfaces to make life easier for the
designer. It'd be quite feasible to put that sort of thing into (say) an
XML resource linked into any native DLL, and to write a high-level
designed that targeted MFC (or any other native framework, for that
matter). All that's needed is the will to make the tools for native
development better ... better than they are, and better than the .NET
stuff.
Yes, but we were talking of MFC library enhancements that 3rd parties like
CodeJock can legitimately improve on. Only Microsoft can make the IDE
better. Well, someone could make new plug-ins for the IDE, but no one has
done any MFC specific ones.
Don't imagine that we MFC developers like getting our hands dirty when we
don't have to ... if we had tools to etch-a-sketch a GUI and keep our
hands clean we'd use them, just like .NET developers do. The difference
is that we would also know how to things that the tools didn't automate,
and that we'd be able to look under the covers and fix it if anything
went wrong. The "philosophical difference" here is within MS, where they
seem to think that because we do know how to work at the low level we
actually like to do so ... that's not true, we can be as lazy as the next
developer when we have tools that actually work and that do a job worth
doing.
It's no MS that I was referring to. It was makers of MFC libaries like
CodeJock and (formerly) Dundas that do this too. It's the whole MFC
ecosystem that is low-level.
Just because .NET has better tools today, that doesn't mean that is has
to be that way.
Of course it doesn't have to be that way. But it is that way, and has been
that way for more than a decade. It's stuck in a rut.
-- David