Comments on: Why is MFC Not Dead?

By: b123

b123 — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 11:08:29 +0000

MFC is alive and well in VS2010. Thanks Microsoft for finally listening to the huge native base.

By: Mr_MFC

Mr_MFC — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 18:24:23 +0000

I dont want my commercial apps decompiled.

By: Scott Bruno

Scott Bruno — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:18:18 +0000

I realize this is a little late but there are two reasons.

#1 reason of course is the sheer volume of MFC apps in use on the planet Earth right now. There are those who would have you believe that .NET is everywhere but nothing could be further from the truth.

#2 For many people there is simply no reason to incur either the penalty of rewriting all those huge apps in C# or the penalty of .NET’s comparatively poor performance. I can hear eyebrows going up already but if you make database apps all day you probably don’t know the difference to begin with. If on the other hand you learned your craft in a performance-oriented world then the difference is as plain as day.

Not only that, but recent developments in .NET are even LESS attractive to people like me. What could the purpose of something like WPF *possibly* be except to consume memory & CPU in breathtaking amounts?

MFC cannot die anytime soon, despite the woefully wrong direction the folks at MSFT have taken as of late.

By: Raijin

Raijin — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:27:56 +0000

WinXp Professional or Home Editon have only the Version 1.1 of the .NET suite installed.The other version are optional.And it’s not only about the size of the .NET applications,it’s also about their speed of execution and their performance in general.They say that it’s only a minor reduction,but if you compare any application written in C# or C++/CLI with one written in native/unmanaged C++ you’ll see that the performance
is becoming an issue with the larger applications.And don’t forget the security problem of the MSIL…Despite all the obsfuscators and encrypters and such tools,the decompiling of the intermediate language is not a very big problem.

By: Steve Novoselac

Steve Novoselac — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 11:50:35 +0000

Yes, all apps will work on vista. According to market share reports for March 2008, its around 14% – not to shabby, but not to great either, (report here: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=10) I don’t see anywhere where .net framework is installed with sp2, I don’t believe it is, I may be wrong – (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework) – every time they ship it, its an optional install, just like it is an optional install on windows update. I think Windows Media Center XP and Tablet XP Editions had 1.1 by default because apps on their needed it, but market share for those are blips on the radar.

As far as in running on linux out of the box too, according to that market share report above linux is .61%, once again a blip, and take that .61 and reduce it to gnome based linux distros that are totally up to date. Also you have to remember just because you make it with .NET on windows doesn’t mean it will run in mono. Many of the windowing functions aren’t the same (GTK#, etc) and then registry and other windows specific stuff might not work in mono, so with that you can say, yeah it might run on a few machines, if you code your app in just the right way, but, it really doesnt.

I still stick by my point that the MAJORITY of boxes out there won’t run your app by default, and if you want the broadest market share, you just aren’t going to choose .NET

By: Onur Gumus

Onur Gumus — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 11:16:43 +0000

“Right now you can make an MFC app and it can run on win98,2k,xp,vista, etc – out of the box. Anything with .NET requires the framework, and if you want your app to just be downloaded and ran, then the framework limitation hurts you. Why make someone download and install a d 20+ MB framework?”

This is quite misleading. Here’s why: First of all Vista comes with .net 3.0 framework so all .net applications will work out of box on vista. And even now vista is being widely used.

For XP, IIRC windows xp service pack 2 also includes .net framework 2.0. So if we add up all computers Vista + Windows xp sp2 which should make around 80% of all desktop computers. There are some win 98 or win2000 computers but usage is relatively small.

One final note, your .NET applications WILL RUN ON LINUX OUT OF BOX TOO!!!. Yes you heard it correct any gnome based linux distro includes mono which is close to .net 3.5 level at the time being.

By: Steve Novoselac

Steve Novoselac — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 02:49:47 +0000

Yeah I have used a few of those tools that strip out just what you need, I kind of mentioned it in the post. Some of them work, some don’t depends. When I was testing, I could never get my exe less than 5-8 MB, which is still very high (I could make same app in MFC in 500kb)

By: Jonathan H

Jonathan H — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 23:50:16 +0000

There is a handy tool that packages just the .NET libraries you need with your application, so you can deploy without any framework woes.

http://weblogs.asp.net/dvravikanth/archive/2004/04/14/112785.aspx

You can do it by hand as well, but the tool makes it easier.

Additionally, I have yet to come across someone who doesn’t at least have the 1.1 runtime installed.

By: Steve Novoselac

Steve Novoselac — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 22:56:36 +0000

not sure if MSFT uses MFC as much as Win32, but yeah, you are right there. And yeah, that stinks Java is installed, but not .NET, that makes me cringe.

By: Dan Howard

Dan Howard — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:57:28 +0000

People still use MFC because that’s what Microsoft themselves use. This is a case of Microsoft not eating their own dog food.

What Microsoft should have done if .net really was a ‘bet the bank’ technology as they claim, would have been to always include all the .net releases to-date with the releases of Windows. This would have solved many pain points for developers. Why they never did this – who knows?

A friend of mine recently got a new Dell and he asked me to help him set it up. Out of curiosity I looked at what was pre-installed on it. Sadly for .net, the Java JRE 6.0 WAS installed but not dot net.