An Overview of MFC, Part 1 - Getting Started with MFC
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Visual Studio and Visual C++ together are much more than an IDE with a compiler. They are a full fledged application development environment for Windows that, when used correctly, lets you exercise the object oriented nature of C++ to create robust and scalable 32-bit Windows applications. To get the most out of this powerful environment, one must be well versed in the C++ programming language and a few other language features. To write code in MFC using C++, you need to know C++ well, conceptually at least.
You must also be familiar with the Microsoft Foundation Classes’ hierarchy. This class hierarchy does the fabulous job of encapsulating the user-interface-related APIs, and makes it conceptually easier to create Windows applications in an object-oriented way -- because now you think in terms of the application logic, rather than where to handle message and where to put the code! This hierarchy is well defined and exposes only the APIs which a specific version of Windows supports by magical use of #ifdefs, thus covering all versions of Windows. Hence the code you write using MFC is a lot more portable than old fashioned C/SDK code.
In this article we’re going to learn the essentials needed to begin with MFC programming, and then talk about event driven programming. You need to do that kind of programming anyway when you program for Windows. We will also write a plain MFC "Hello World" application just to see how well we understood the basics. In future articles we’ll also discuss the details of the MFC library so that you may appreciate the way MFC was written and used now.
Next: What is MFC anyway? >>
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