Beginning MFC for the first time and would like a little help!! Please!!

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I guess my last question was a little too vague. I can write in C/C++/COBOL/HTML/VB/FORTRAN and I dabble in a few others. I just need some help learning the Windows way of programming. Almost anyone can create an MFC project using MS Visual Studio 2010, but I'm having trouble wrapping my head around it. I searched the Internet and forum after forum for answers, but still empty headed. If some good hearted person(s) would show me the next steps after creating an SDI project for creating a simple phonebook program. I can write the program in C++/CLI, but I have NO idea how to incorporate this into a windows program. I would ALMOST pay someone a million dollars to show me how to do this. PLEASE and THANK YOU!

Posted 1-Jun-11 14:14pm

DrBones69

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Albert Holguin · Accepted Answer · 2011-06-01T14:43:00

This is a really broad question... but here's the gist of it.

Well, MFC is an object oriented framework that wraps around the WinAPI. Essentially it does a few things auto-magically for you, the most essential parts being registering as a process with Windows upon startup and creates an entry point (which you can do without MFC as well). If you tell VS2010 that you want to build an MFC app, it'll create a baseline for you derived from CWinApp (which contains InitDialog(), where you start everything related to your app), an MFC class that does a bunch of initialization for you plus creates a message pump so that you can message to/from the app. From there, it sort of branches depending on what type of app it is. The simplest is probably the dialog based application. It consists of a CWinApp and a dialog typically derived from CDialog(). The dialog class is meant to enclose all GUI related controls. If you're going to build your first MFC app, I'd recommend starting with a dialog application.

[edit]
...You can use the wizard to help you start off with a dialog but make sure you understand the code that it put in for you, in the long run, that'll make your life way easier. After a while you can do everything by hand (which is what you want to end up doing anyway if you're going to do extensive development that you can support).
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[edit2]
And before it gets misinterpreted, MFC is a FRAMEWORK, not necessarily just a wrapper on WinAPI. So it provides a baseline for building applications much like Qt or other frameworks would.
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