Working with the Statusbar in MFC
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Staying up to date with what's happening inside a program is crucial. The user should always know what he is waiting for or what he has to do next. To satisfy this duty, the creators of the Windows Operating System graphic user interface implemented a bar that lets you show various information. Over time this bar has come to be called the Statusbar. Along with other controls, when the MFC Extension Pack was launched, this item got a well-deserved upgrade in the world of MFC. Let us review this interesting part of our applications. This article is the first in an eight-part series.
The MFC was quite well received with the Visual Studio 6.0 package, and soon became one of the standards used to create applications under the Windows platform. This makes sense if you also know that MFC is the abbreviation for "Microsoft Foundation Class Library." Moreover, it was mainly developed by Microsoft to make Windows more popular.
However, as time has passed, the people from Redmond realized that it is a little too troublesome to create applications in the world of unmanaged programming. Therefore, they came up with a wise solution: they created a new managed language (C#) that made it a lot easier for people with little or no programming knowledge to create complicated applications. The down side of this was that managed programming also introduced heavy performance penalties.
These penalties must not exist if you create programs that require heavy CPU usage. This is the case when we are talking about video processing and CAD programs. Moreover, for any C# program to work, the presence of the .Net platform is required, because there are no longer machine codes generated, as would be in the case of a MFC program. With these programs, the world of C++ and MFC remains the only choice.
Realizing that they were losing market share with the aging of their MFC platform (not updated since the Visual Studio 2003 release), Microsoft decided to make a move. A little company had the opportunity to make the improvements. You can already see the result as the MFC Feature Pack. Inside this, the Statusbar also gained a couple of improvements. Today, I am going to show you how to use the bar generally, and in a future article, the new additions.
Next: Before the MFC Feature Pack >>
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