MFC Versus WinForms
Some folks do need to build document-based applications, and even though WinForms isn't designed to support that as well as MFC is, it's not very hard to build complete document-based applications if you're armed with the knowledge of what WinForms does and doesn't provide as compared with MFC. Table A.1 shows a feature-based summary focused on building document-based applications.
| Feature | MFC | WinForms/.NET |
|---|---|---|
| Application Wizards | Four | Four |
| IDE Integration | Yes | Yes |
| Dialog, SDI, MDI Applications | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-SDI Applications | Yes | No |
| UI Layout | Yes (dialogs only) | Yes |
| Docking and Splitting | Yes (simple) | Yes |
| Anchoring | No | Yes |
| Toolbars and the like | Yes | Yes (no floating) |
| Printing, Preview, Setup | Yes | Yes |
| OLE/Active Documents | Yes | No |
| COM ... |
Get Windows Forms Programming in C# now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
