Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Life As a C++/MFC Programmer

One vast improvement over raw C/API development is the use of the C++ programming language. In many ways, C++ can be thought of as an object-oriented layer on top of C. Thus, even though C++ programmers benefit from the famed “pillars of OOP” (encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism), they are still at the mercy of the painful aspects of the C language (e.g., manual memory management, ugly pointer arithmetic, and ugly syntactical constructs).
Despite its complexity, many C++ frameworks exist today. For example, the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) provide the developer with a set of C++ classes that facilitate the construction of Win32 applications. The main role of MFC is to wrap a “sane subset” of the raw Win32 API behind a number of classes, magic macros, and numerous code-generation tools (a.k.a. wizards). Regardless of the helpful assistance offered by the MFC framework (as well as many other C++-based windowing toolkits), the fact of the matter is that C++ programming remains a difficult and error-prone experience, given its historical roots in C.
Source : Pro C# 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform - Andrew Troelsen

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