Feature Pack MFC (and VS 2010) has added support for "several" modern "graphical interfaces" (such as tabbed MDI, ribbon and a Visual Studio-style interface with docking stations). This is good for those of us who need support legacy MFC-based applications and want to update their appearance and a sign that Microsoft has not completely abandoned unmanaged development in C ++. However, with such a strong push in favor of .NET, WinForms and managed code (and for many good reasons), there seems to be little reason to develop new applications in unmanaged C ++ / MFC.
The question then becomes how to get these GUI elements in a WinForms application. Almost all add-ons and libraries that I have found so far cost money and introduce additional dependencies. I don’t have a budget to buy third-party libraries, and the funds provided by Microsoft in MFC for free seem to be sufficient for our needs. But I still have reservations regarding teaching MFC how to develop a new application. Not only does the investment in time seem significant (by all accounts, MFC seems especially difficult to learn even for experienced .NET developers, although I’m ready to try it), but the question of MFC lifespan is also raised. Of course, given the millions of lines of code and existing applications written in native C ++, this will be for some time, but the handwriting seems to be on the wall, so to speak,that he no longer advertised the Microsoft development platform.
It seems that these functions should be available by now in WinForms without the need for third-party add-ons or to allocate a lot of time and resources to an arbitrary ALL drawing. Did I miss something? I find very little online that compares these new MFC features with what's available in WinForms, mainly because most of everything that was written in MFC is dated from the last update, before which it looked recognized as “dated”, and with it other shortcomings, there was hardly an attractive platform for new development. With the recent release of VS 2010, we have time to wait until WinForms is updated again. What routes do you take for applications whose customers require a modern user interface for the budget?