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This is a good question with a probably good reason. MFC was the main UI toolkit in the past. Microsoft probably used it in it’s main products that could be understood as the cash cows. That is, they are important parts that have been developed and much has been invested so far. Thus they stuck to this technology and framework that may change in my mind as soon as possible, but by the size of these projects I predict still some years that MFC could be used. Further, you may not go into a new Visual Studio version for your MFC developments when they drop MFC. Also they probably still rely on a software vendor that is doing the main UI improvements in the near past. If that company gets into trouble, we will see the outcome with the solution to that trouble. If Microsoft, for example takes that company over, that may be a sign of future for MFC. Their Ribbon feature is told to be developed with MFC and so is probably still Office using this framework.
Why do I mention this?
Due to the fact that my open source framework or better the main application looks a little bit out dated on Windows machines, I plan to give it a fresh look. That is of course only on Windows and thus a commercial spin off I shortly bragged about.
Why do I do MFC again?
The nice GUI features it now provides is key for modern applications and I want also to support prototyping that kind of MFC applications.
Isn’t there a backdrop into a commercial GUI library?
Yes that is the case. But I am now able to use the GUI framework in a way I avoid a lock in! The development of my framework enables enables me to keep as much as possible decoupled as possible while benefiting from other frameworks. That is, on the one side, I am able to go to DevExpress and integrate stuff there and find a path for a product or I could keep more reused from my C++ code. That is because I have developed it strictly in a modular fashion to have exactly that capability..
So far, that’s it here. I gave a story about me and why I started open source development. Also I gave a little outlook to the future of this project and my activities. Feel free to look at my code. The lbdmf repository is kept as close as possible to my development as I am in the progress of migrating to Git at all. The other repositories that I have pinned except this site are solely some snapshots of the past, not well structured and just for fun there to have made them public.
| The current state and why it is still alive | Top |