quote:Originally posted by SabreMan, in another thread One question: why are you doing this when you could be using an existing GUI toolkit that already solves the problems you''re encountering?

That question made me think: does MFC cut it for app development? Or does everyone use homebrewed classes for common tasks? I noticed that while MFC has just about EVERYTHING in there practically it seems like you still have to make API calls (for things like Timers) and many things (such as asynchronous sockets) are sub-par. Particularly, I object to the abuse of inheritance that CAsyncSocket employs, which forces client classes to derive from CAsyncSocket itself. Client classes are not a type of CAsyncSocket. They should have used callbacks. The nonblocking sockets in MFC, according to the Winsock Programmers Guide (URL I''ll come back with later), for some strange reason, spawn a worker thread and wait inside it (they derive from CAsyncSocket even) when the blocking calls would more than suffice. My guess is they didn''t want newbies hanging the GUI thread with blocking calls. To their credit, they do use RAII effectively, and the message map tables are cute but WTL/windowsx.h does them the same way as well and has no runtime requirement. The runtime is also ubiquitous, and most C++ Win32 apps are programmed in MFC. Is that good enough for you to use it? For me, it isn''t. What are your thoughts?

I'll take raw Win32 instead. It is gross, but Win32 really does want to to be objectified.

VCL...is that Borland's suite?

Lack of great alternatives doesn't make the mediocre ones better in my eyes, especially in the face of .Net's solid libraries.

[edited by - antareus on June 5, 2003 6:22:19 PM]

What are you guys afraid of?
I use raw win32 all the time, and in time I developed
my own classes, to handle window events, manage
dialog creatures, like textboxes, comboboxes, etc...

I allways wondered what MFC offered that made everyone
flock to it. I see it as a "VB" approach, but used by
those that already know C... VB aproach in the sense
that it shells you from having to deal with the raw win32
things...

Well, maybe you guys are in a Fast-Devlopment environment,
where everything is pretty much needed for yesterday, and
it forces you into a position where you have to adopt
something similar to MFC, or MFC itself...

Or maybe this is just my twisted vision of what a game
needs and uses in term of windows resources, and maybe other
applications are much more deep...

my thoughts ($0.02)

[Hugo Ferreira][Positronic Dreams]
I Am Digerati.

I would be using .NET except for one cosmetic flaw with it.

It appears to be horrible with managing memory, when in reality the task manager misrepresents memory usage by the program. It also isn''t as slim as C++ is.

Anyway I''d be using it except my users wouldn''t adopt things I write because of this flaw.

One word, WTL; well three really, Windows Template Library.


Dave "Dak Lozar" Loeser

WTL is awesome.