MFCMicrosoft Foundation Classes Study Notes

ActiveX Controls with MFC

How MFC's COleControl base class and the MFC ActiveX Control Wizard produce reusable OCX controls with properties, methods, events, and property pages, and how…

Creating Windows with MFC

How MFC's CWnd/CFrameWnd hierarchy and CWinApp::InitInstance replace manual Win32 window registration and message-loop code.

The CString Class

How MFC's CString class manages dynamic text, formatting, searching, and interop with Win32 string APIs.

Custom Drawing and Owner-Draw

How MFC lets you take over rendering of standard controls — buttons, list boxes, combo boxes, list controls — through the owner-draw mechanism and custom-draw…

Debugging MFC Applications

Practical techniques for diagnosing MFC bugs using TRACE, ASSERT_VALID, the debug heap, and Spy++ message inspection.

Dialog-Based Applications

How MFC's dialog-based application template uses DoModal and DDX/DDV to build a self-contained UI without a document/view frame.

Document/View Architecture

How MFC separates an application's underlying data (CDocument) from its on-screen presentation (CView), and how document templates tie the two together with a…

Double Buffering in MFC

Why complex or frequently updated views flicker under naive GDI drawing, and how to eliminate that flicker using an off-screen memory device context in MFC.

Drawing with CDC

A practical tour of the CDC drawing API — lines, shapes, text, and pens/brushes — and the conventions MFC applications follow to render correctly inside OnDraw…

File I/O with MFC

Reading and writing files in MFC using CFile, CStdioFile, and CArchive, plus handling file exceptions correctly.

GDI Basics in MFC

An introduction to the Windows Graphics Device Interface (GDI) and how MFC's CDC class family wraps device contexts, handles, and GDI objects for safe, structu…

Message Maps

How MFC's message-map macros build a static dispatch table that replaces a hand-written WndProc, plus how command routing and UI updates work on top of it.

MFC and COM Integration

How MFC exposes COM support through CCmdTarget, interface maps, and dispatch maps, letting an MFC application act as an automation server or client without han…

MFC and GDI+

How to integrate GDI+ into an MFC application for anti-aliased vector graphics, alpha-blended bitmaps, and richer image format support alongside classic GDI.

MFC Application Architecture

How an MFC application is structured around CWinApp, message maps, and frame windows, and how these pieces cooperate to start up, route input, and shut down cl…

MFC Collection Classes

A tour of MFC's template and legacy collection classes for storing arrays, lists, and maps of data, and how to choose between them.

MFC Common Pitfalls

The recurring mistakes MFC developers make with message maps, GDI resources, and the Document/View architecture, and how to avoid them.

MFC Controls Overview

A tour of MFC's C++ wrapper classes for Windows common controls, how to bind them via DDX_Control, and practical examples with CListCtrl and CComboBox.

MFC Database Access

MFC's two parallel database frameworks - ODBC-based CDatabase/CRecordset and DAO-based CDaoDatabase/CDaoRecordset - and how record field exchange (RFX/DFX) bin…

MFC Exception Handling

How MFC's CException hierarchy works, how to catch and clean up MFC exceptions correctly, and how they interact with standard C++ exceptions.

MFC Feature Pack and Ribbon UI

The Visual Studio 2008 Feature Pack classes (CMFCRibbonBar, CDockablePane, CFrameWndEx) that brought Office-style ribbons, docking panes, and visual managers t…

MFC Interview Questions

Common conceptual and debugging-style MFC interview questions, with the reasoning strong candidates use to answer them.

MFC Project Structure

A tour of the files a Visual Studio MFC project generates - source, resource, and precompiled-header files - and how the build configuration ties them together.

MFC Quick Reference

A condensed lookup of MFC's core class hierarchy, message map macros, and common string/collection/resource idioms.