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I've never been a big fan of MFC, but that's not really the point. I read that Microsoft is due to release a new version of MFC in 2010 and it really struck me as odd - I thought MFC was dead (no ill intention, I really did).
Is is MFC used for new developments? If so, whats the benefit? I couldn't imagine it having any benefit over something such as C# (or even just c++ using Win32 APIs for that matter).
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No, it's not "deprecated".
Win32++ is a simple and easy to understand library for creating Windows applications. It runs on the commonly available free compilers, making it a free alternative to MFC. Win32++ has been designed to make life a little easier for those learning to use C++ to program using the Windows API directly.
MFC is a library that wraps portions of the Windows API in C++ classes, including functionality that enables them to use a default application framework. Classes are defined for many of the handle-managed Windows objects and also for predefined windows and common controls.
The Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) Library provides an object-oriented wrapper over much of the Win32 and COM APIs. Although it can be used to create very simple desktop applications, it is most useful when you need to develop more complex user interfaces with multiple controls.
There is a ton of code out there using MFC. I see these questions all the time is this still used is that still used the answer is yes. I work in a very large organization which still employs hundreds of people who write in cobol. If it has ever been used in the enterprise it will continue to be used until there is no more hardware to support it, then some company will pay someone to write an emulator so that the old code will still work.
The navy still uses ships with computers with magnetic cores for memory and I'm sure they have people to work on them. Technology once created can never not be supported. its a bit of the case of Deus ex machina where large organizations aren't completely sure what their system do and have such an overriding sense of fear of brining the enterprise to its knees they have no desire to try out you new fangled technologies(BTW we pay IBM for best effort support on OS2).
Also mfc is a perfectly acceptable solution for windows development given it is an object model which wraps the System API which is pretty much all that most people get out of .net.
As an addendum and since this question is up for a bounty this is a quote from MS regarding mfc in VS 11
In every release we need to balance our investment across the various areas of the product. However, we still believe that MFC is the most fully-featured library for building native desktop applications. We are fully committed to supporting and maintaining MFC at a high level of quality. Here’s a short list of some of the issues that we fixed in MFC for Visual Studio 11:
Here is the link if you want to read the full post
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