Visually Upgrade Your MFC Project
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From time to time even the best applications need a design update. This helps both the design company and the end user. The end user benefits from using a refreshed, updated tool that reflects current technology and appears newer aesthetically. The development team, on the other hand, get some extra cash for the modern design. If you have an older application developed under MFC, this article series will be perfect for you.
You may recall that some time back I wrote an article about how to upgrade your MFC program with just a recompile under Vista. You can find this article here. In that article I tried to present what kind of a "new look" update you can get with no or minimal coding effort after the release of the MFC Feature Pack with the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1. This time I will delve more into the technical parts and focus on the new controls, additions and improvements that you can find in this pack.
Read on only if you have good knowledge of MFC. You should understand how it works, with its old classes and message maps. When I write "old," I refer to the ones present prior to the MFC Feature Pack. You can find tons of information on this topic in most of the books released about MFC.
You'll find relatively little information, however, about the new items in the feature pack. MSDN gives you a good idea of how to upgrade your application through three articles. Nevertheless, at least in my opinion, it fails to present the new additions in depth. The series I start today will try to put an end to this.
For starters, I will go into some basic information you need on how to upgrade an old application. What better method is there than using an old application's source? To point out that any application that uses MFC will do it, I have chosen a project build with Visual Studio 6.
It is an open source project, so anyone can have access to it and play around with it. I used XML Explorer. This is "A utility to query xml files using XPath and also extend XPath to more documents than one." Ignoring the XPath and XML part, we are going to work with how it looks. As part of maintaining the open-source license, I am going to post the source code for what I change. If I managed to raise your interest, then click the link to the next page button and keep reading.
Next: Starting up >>
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