This is a Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition C++ solution using the MFC project templates.
The purpose of this solution is to investigate using newer technologies such as:
- concurrency task threading functionality
- C++/WinRT for functionality that is allowed to be used with desktop apps, that are not UWP packages
- learning and using C++11/17 standard compliant, modern C++
See the stackoverflow question https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50669108/c11-threads-to-update-mfc-application-windows-sendmessage-postmessage-re
See this Microsoft Channel 9 video Effective C++/WinRT for UWP and Win32 https://channel9.msdn.com/events/Build/2018/BRK2425?term=uwp%20C++&lang-en=true
There are a number of documents, text and video, containing materials on the subjects of MFC, Windows messages, C++11/17/20, and C++/WinRT.
Unfortunately the quality of the materials vary and quite a few seem to be a bit sparse on important details.
Following is a collection of materials from Microsoft, CppCon proceedings, and various bloggers which can provide quite a bit of the necessary background to being able to understand threading in C++ and Windows and MFC and C++/WinRT.
It seems that there are a couple of different technologies which can be mixed together:
- C++11/17/20 standards and Technical Specification for coroutines
- Microsoft Visual Studio concurrency functionality and PPL in the header pplawait.h
- Microsoft C++/WinRT, a C++ Language Projection of Windows Runtime or WinRT
- Microsoft Foundation Classes framework technology
CppCon 2017: Scott Jones & Kenny Kerr “C++/WinRT and the Future of C++ on Windows” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TdpWB_vRZM
This repository is a simple Microsoft Foundaton Classes (MFC) application to experiment with mixing in non-MFC technologies.
The initial application source code was created using the File -> New -> Project menu item of Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition and choosing the Visual Studio style them. This theme provides the various dockable panes and windows that are part of the Visual Studio IDE for at least a decade or two (Visual Studio 2005 had this technology).
If you are new to using MFC with Visual Studio 2017 you should know that it now seems to be considered an optional component of Visual Studio. In Visual Studio 2005, when you installed the IDE the templates for MFC were automatically installed. However in Visual Studio 2017 the MFC templates must be selected.
If you have already installed Visual Studio 2017 then you can modify the installation. See this StackOverflow answer which provides a procedure for doing so. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43074045/mfc-development-in-vs2017/47104815#47104815
The MFC framework is a bit old, from the 1990s and Visual Studio 6.x, however it is still supported as of Visual Studio 2017 and it provides a nice desktop style framework. It is a fairly heavy technology and requires the MFC DLL which is included in the Windows operating system installation materials. It also requires the Win32 API so MFC can not be used on a Windows RT version of the Windows operating system which does not have the Win32 API nor the MFC DLL.
Since MFC is an older technology desktop versions of Windows going back to Windows NT have the MFC DLL. This means that an MFC application can be run on Windows 7 and POS Ready 7 as well as Windows 8 and Windows 10 and Windows 10 IoT Enterprise. However an MFC application can not be run on Windows 10 IoT Core or any other Windows RT type of Windows operating system.
The original MFC framework and technology was developed at a time when the C++98 Standard was being hammered out and
due to the discussions about the C++ Standard Library content, the MFC framework contains a number of classes that
duplicate some of the collections functionality of C++. So MFC contains a CArray class and a CString class and
the original MFC was designed to work with those MFC specific versions of the C++ Standard Library classes.
However these days the C++11/17 Standard Library is superior to the MFC classes which duplicate collections and from what I have read, the C++ Standard Library should be used for collections, strings, etc.
MFC was intended to be an object oriented framework to wrap around the Win32 API and to extend it in order to make the development of desktop application easier while also providing a standard look and feel. However there are a number of places where object oriented design and programming were broken in order to provide some functionality.
MFC has as its core architecture the MVC design pattern. There are three basic templates: dialog based application, single document application, and multiple document application. For the later two there are a number of classes which help with a document/view architecture in which a data source, a document, has one or more views which provide a display of the data for a particular view or perspective. An example of multiple views would be a view that displays a document in a grid of rows and columns with another view showing the same document as a series of graphs or maps. As the document is updated, the document class informs the views that have registered with the document class that the data has changed, implementing an Observer desgin Pattern.
The Windows Win32 API uses a 16 bit UNICODE character set for almost every function whose interface requires a text
string of some kind. Originally MFC offered the CString class for dynamic strings, similar to the std::string
functionality of the C++ Standard Library.
The default for std::string is an 8 bit character set so instead of using std::string to replace the use of the
CString MFC class you should use std::wstring which is a wide character or 16 bit character string.
In order to use std::wstring with MFC functions that normally call for a text string, you will need to use the c_str()
method of std::wstring.
TODO: Describe and show how to build your code and run the tests.
TODO: Explain how other users and developers can contribute to make your code better.
If you want to learn more about creating good readme files then refer the following guidelines. You can also seek inspiration from the below readme files: