MFC is not dead

When I wrote my master's thesis was the first time I came in to contact with VC++ and MFC. I worked with MFC and VC++ quite a lot for a number of years but the last four or five years have not had much MFC work in it. When the .Net framework came along with the possibility to write managed C++ applications I thought MFC was dead and didn't give it much more thought.

Then I read about the new VC++2008 feature pack here and watched the channel 9 video referenced. I noticed how the reporter also questions the MFC developer about the presumed death of MFC. Apparently MFC is not dead as many, including me, thought. The reason I thought so was that I just assumed that with managed C++ no one would bother writing them unmanaged in MFC any more. But when I think a little more about it I guess there are lots of people still out there who are familiar with the MFC framework and who do not have the time and/or interest to learn the new managed equivalents.

Some might say that you want to write MFC applications in stead of managed ones because the users do not have the .Net framework installed. A fair point but frankly I do not think that the user that will benefit from this MFC update (which for example includes office ribbon support for office 2007) also already have the .Net framework installed.

Update: I noticed that this post was referenced by this one: https://blog.stevienova.com/2008/04/12/why-is-mfc-not-dead/. I realized I was not 100% clear in my post. I must say that I agree with the author of that post - MFC will be used for many years for the reasons mentioned: People want to make applications that work across many different versions of Windows without installing the .Net framework. There was never a doubt in my mind that was the case. However I was surprised there was so much new development put into new versions of MFC since I guess all the new stuff will not work very well anyway. And much of the new stuff in MFC is there to mimic stuff seen in the managed framework and/or in latest versions of office/windows. And if you run Vista or Server 2008 I guess you will have the .net framework already installed and hence do not need to use MFC.