The Microsoft Foundation Classes, or MFC, is a library that provides an object-oriented wrapper around the Win32 API. By encapsulating the "raw" Win32 API in C++ classes, MFC makes it significantly easier to create GUI applications and manage resources.
MFC has been around a very long time. It was first introduced in 1992 with version 7 of Microsoft's C/C++ compiler. At this time, C++ development was just beginning to take off. Subsequent versions of Visual Studio have shipped with significantly improved versions of MFC. It is still included with the latest version of Visual Studio 2015. But its legacy roots are unfortunately quite visible. Since most of it was developed prior to the standardization of the C++ language, the MFC classes do not make full use of modern C++ features like templates, provide their own custom implementations of other standard C++ features like RTTI, and use many non-standard idioms. These facts make it nearly impossible to compile an MFC application with any compiler other than Microsoft's. On the plus side, though, MFC is well-integrated into Visual Studio, making development significantly easier.
During early development, the library was known as Application Framework Extensions (abbreviated to AFX). The marketing department later changed its name to MFC, but it was too late to change any of the code, so much of the code still references "Afx" instead of "Mfc". A noticeable example is the standard pre-compiled header file that is automatically generated by Visual Studio: it is named StdAfx.h.
On 7 April 2008, Microsoft released an update to the MFC classes as an out-of-band update to Visual Studio 2008 and MFC 9. The update features new user interface constructs, including the ribbons (similar to that of Microsoft Office 2007) and associated UI widgets, fully customizable toolbars, docking panes (like Visual Studio 2005) which can either be freely floated or docked to any side and document tabs. The new functionality is provided in new classes so that old applications still continue to run. This update is building on top of BCGSoft’s BCGControlBar Library Professional Edition and was named as MFC Feature Pack.
So now MFC consists from two library with different approaches:
MFC supports worker threads and gui threads (threads with message loops). See https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/975t8ks0.aspx for more documentation.
Almost all MFC applications have toolbar and status bar - special types of the control bar that docked to top and bottom part of application main frame. But often application logic requires more the information bars docked to some side of frame, for example it may be properties bar or classes bar, preview bar, output bar and many others. Classic MFC have good solution only for toolbars and others controls that not dynamically resizable. But MFC Feature Pack have advanced docking manager that allows:
All you need is to inherit your docking bar from CDockablePane class.
I was working on a migration task where I came across a project. The legacy ISAPI project was an MFC extension DLL project built in VS2005 and after googling few things I came to know that the MFC ISAPI classes (CHttpServerContext, CHttpServer etc.) are not being shipped after VS2005. Microsoft recommends using ISAPI Entry-Point functions from the Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) software development kit (SDK) instead of MFC ISAPI classes. I thought it might require a complete rewriting of the project. However fortunately I took an experimental way which worked in my case. I thought to write this article which might help someone to solve the similar issue.
Purpose of this topic is to demonstrate the changes required for removing dependency of MFC from MFC ISAPI Extension DLL without rewriting of complete code. Example shown above doesn't contain whole implementation, it is just for demonstration purpose.