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Why would I want to move my application away from the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC)?
Entry number: 202 - Why would I want to move my application away from the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC)?
Answer:
There are several reasons why you may want to do that:
- To bring your application into the future, and stay current with the state of the art in GUIs. According to Microsoft (ref. MSDN Webcast), MFC is "becoming dated as an application framework", and moving forward, Microsoft is "not going to put in a lot of investments for adding new UI functionality into MFC".
- To let your application run on other platforms in addition to MS Windows. The rapidly growing adoption of Linux in particular means that you will want to be prepared for your users demanding that your application can be supported that platform.
- To increase productivity. Programmers generally agree that when compared to using a more modern toolkit, development with MFC is more complex, tedious, and error-prone. Also, while MFC covers only GUI functionality, productivity gains can be had by employing a more complete toolkit which avoids the developers having to resort to other, unrelated APIs for handling tasks like networking, multi-threading, database access, etc.