The Development System

Chapter 22 - The Microsoft Foundation Class Library: Fundamentals

Visual C++ 6: The Complete Reference
Chris H. Pappas and William H. Murray, III
  Copyright 1998 The McGraw-Hill Companies

The Need for a Foundation Class Library
The MFC library provides programmers with easy-to-use objects. Windows, from its very inception, has followed many principles of object-oriented programming design, within the framework of a non-object-oriented language like C. Many of these features were discussed in the previous two chapters. The marriage of C++ and Windows was a natural that can take full advantage of object-oriented features. The MFC development team designed a comprehensive implementation of the Windows Application Program Interface (API). This C++ library encapsulates the most important data structures and API function calls within a group of reusable classes.
Class libraries such as the MFC offer many advantages over the traditional function libraries used by C programmers and discussed in the previous two chapters.
The following list includes many of the usual advantages of C++ classes:
  Elimination of function and variable name collisions
  Encapsulation of code and data within the class
  Inheritance
  Often, reduced code size resulting from well-designed class libraries
  Resulting classes appearing to be natural extensions of the language
With the use of the MFC library, the code required to establish a window has been reduced to approximately one-third the length of a conventional application. This allows you, the developer, to spend less time communicating with Windows and more time developing your application’s code.

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Visual C++ 6(c) The Complete Reference
Visual Studio 6: The Complete Reference
ISBN: B00007FYGA
EAN: N/A
Year: 1998
Pages: 207

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