Advantages of Using the MFC Libraries: Overview

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MFC is the easiest way for you to achieve two kinds of portability:

  • Portability among different operating systems

  • Portability among different processors, such as x86 and DEC Alpha

MFC is designed to wrap your C/C++ applications to work on almost any operating system with little or no modification, including 16-bit and 32-bit Windows and UNIX if a UNIX MFC library is present. MFC is also designed to be completely portable among different processors.

Note that if you want to write ANSI Standard C++ applications, you cannot use the MFC libraries. See Write Code that Works in the Largest Number of C Compilers for help on writing strict ANSI Standard C++. 

Advantages of MFC

MFC is an application framework designed for rapid Windows development. Visual C++ for Intel x86, Alpha, and PowerPC are all Windows NT-based. They are designed to be portable among each other. MFC's job is to make C++ code universal on these platforms by wrapping the system dependent code, such as messages, and your applications should port easily among the platforms. In most cases, a Visual C++ application created in the development environment on one of these platforms can be opened in the development environment on another platform and the conversion is done automatically. See Port to and from Non-Intel Platforms.

If you want to develop UNIX applications and your UNIX system has the UNIX version of MFC, your Visual C++ applications should port with no problem. If you want to port your UNIX application to 32-bit windows, see Port from UNIX to Win32.