Currently I am working in a project that uses MFC a lot, but it seems to me that MFC technology is not widely used nowadays. How deprecated is MFC? What are the alternatives for it? I am using VS2010 on Windows.
Thank you for your answers.
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No, it's not state of the art. No, it's **not "deprecated"**. At least not by anyone with the official status to deprecate it. – Cody Gray - on strike Dec 23 '11 at 11:00
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You may also look at this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2598006/will-vc-mfc-become-obsolete-in-near-future – dwo Dec 23 '11 at 11:11
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possible duplicate of [Is There Still A Case For MFC](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/121184/is-there-still-a-case-for-mfc) – Cody Gray - on strike Dec 23 '11 at 11:18
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Yes, MFC is not what you would call state-of-the-art. If you are starting a new (UI) application from scratch, you should come up with really strong reasons to use MFC (for example, you have already existing code). There are many disadvantages, for exeample the document/view archtiecture, which is only suitable for small UI applications or the high amount of customization you need to put in, if you want controls that are not included in this framework (and you certainly will at some point). Additionally, it is not that easy to test MFC classes, which you should have in mind as well.
Widely used are approaches with a MVC (model-view-controller) architecture. You can read more about these two archiectures here:
Document / View as used in MFC
As you are considering MFC, I assume you already have knowledge in C++. Therefore, the Qt Framework from Trolltech / Nokia might be interesting for you. It supports MVC architecture, is cross-platform compatible and still actively developed.
CppChris
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MFC is not so bad. The problem is that most of the components (windows/widgets) are pretty bad or more precisely very inflexible. As Hans said it's 18 years of backward compatibility and therefore every clock cycle and memory byte counted. This hurts today.
I'm using it because Windows Forms and WPF is just not useable for cross platform GUI development where the lingua franca of the backend is C or C++ (if Java is not an option for your project for whatever reason).
Depending on what you want to do and how important a very native looking GUI is, MFC might be the only choice, especially when you can afford to buy third party components and use the feature-pack or Ribbons.
I not commenting on QT/GTK/FLTK or other toolkit as long as you don't tell us more about your project
