Thread: MFC and Win32

  1. #1
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    MFC and Win32

    In the "industry," which is used more, MFC or Win32? Coming from C# and Java, MFC seems overly complicated.

  2. #2
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    hmm

    I am not to sure which is more commonly used, but I was just looking at a job offering as a tools programmer and they wanted someone with 1 years experience with MFC. I highly think it should be Win32 =/

  3. #3
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    Should be, maybe, but remember MFC is effectively object-oriented Windows. That means that all the nice peeps in suits can draw wild and crazy charts indicating that messages go from here to there, with the result being piped to a file object, the web, blah blah blah. The more senior managements types love this kind of stuff and will pay serious money for a good show.

    Also generally speaking MFC is faster to product than plain Win32. I don't think anyone could call it proper RAD (there's always something it does that you'll spend a month tracking down and fixing), but it's faster.

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    Ha. Yeah, all that message passing stuff is unnecessarily complicated. Just to read from a socket, you need to do this mumbo-jumbo (or at least in this unmaintainable code I'm enhancing). In C, you just set some fields in a structure and open up a socket. It is interesting how Sun came along and came up with a much better way of doing GUI development.
    And is X any better? I did a small X program once, and it wasn't as nearly as bad as the simplest MFC application.

  5. #5
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    Quote Originally Posted by Yasir_Malik
    Yeah, all that message passing stuff is unnecessarily complicated.
    You'll have to get used to it considering it's the core of most window user applications. It's pretty simple really. Everything you do, massive amounts of message passing is done in the userland of windows. It's not a 'bad' way to do user applications, but it most certainly isn't the best. No better than the X Window system. No worse. Everything has it's quirks, messages never bothered me.

    Anyway, the MFC is just a class library that simply glazes over the Win32 API. The MFC can be faster to develop with at the expense of a somewhat odd learning curve. I couldn't ever fully grasp it due to the fact that it's like it's own, really awkwardly built world. However, for exceptionally complex programs like a database frontend, it can save you lots of time spending code you'd rewrite otherwise.


    If you get interested in MFC development, you should probably know the workings of the Win32 API itself too (at least the graphical portion of it.) The reason is because if you ever want to do something to the actual MFC itself like modify it or build upon it and you don't know the API, you'll have a hell of a time making yourself feel dumb in an IRC channel when people start explaining stuff to you in the terms of the actual API and you're just saying "wtf."
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