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Just keeping track of how the user set things up in order to reproduce the layout later is a big pain. If you have ever handled any of that U/I overhead yourself, you know that it can get terribly complicated. You can even float a panel outside of the application window altogether - which lets you take advantage of the screen real estate on your second (or third) video monitor. As a user, you can float them and reposition them however you like. The same support exists for traditional toolbars and for all of the other panes you see there. It basically simulates a traditional menu, but puts it all inside of a user-configurable buttonbar-type panel. There is a new class, CMFCMenubar that handles that automatically. It is also very easy to remove a feature that you don't need (i.e., most of that stuff).ĭid you notice how the menubar is positioned sideways in that figure? Before taking the screenshot, I dragged the menu bar and let it snap to the left side of the client area.
Mfc application wizard multiple top level documents how to#
It is very easy to replace the simulated content with your own, since you have example code that shows how to do it.
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Trees and other panes are populated with fake items and tabs are given names that will have no meaning for your own program. It seems like overkill to put so much into an AppWizard-generated program. One result is that every AppWizard-generated program is a very detailed example of lots of new features.īasically all of the U/I features that you see in the Visual Studios IDE are are now available for use in your own programs: Panels that dock or float, panel groups with tabs, MDI interface that uses tabs, hide-away panes that collapse against the sides or you can "pin" open for repeated use (my favorite feature). If you don't want a feature (such as a dockable tree pane), you remove it from the program. The way the AppWizard works for creating these template apps is that it throws in everything, including the kitchen sink. The functionality is now easily available to anyone who can click radio buttons in the AppWizard: For instance, moving that marble and the Quick Access Toolbar buttons up onto the non-client area required quite a bit of hackwork, but it all gets done behind the scenes. The underlying foundation does a lot of work to make all of this happen. And the "ribbon groups" equate to menus, but in a graphical way that makes them a sort of combination menu and toolbar. The "Vista Orb" or "Pearl" (what I think of as the marble) in the top left corner really basically equates to the old "File" menu. Now you can create an MFC application program with the same scatter of gadgets and gizmos at the top. That look includes a "ribbon" rather than, or in addition to, an old fashioned menu bar. The most visible (visual) additions to MFC is support of a U/I feature that is associated with the slick Vista/Windows 7 "look" - actually the look of Microsoft Office applications. MFC provides the toolkit for serious desktop application programmers. While all of the world seems to be gravitating toward a browser-centric programming model, lots of us programmers in the trenches know that there is still, and always will be, a place for desktop application programs and "thick client" application software. There are really too many new features to cover in even a long article, so I'm going to single out a few things that I think may have an important impact. These same feature are in the MFC libraries that come with Visual Studio 2010, which is now in beta. In this article, I'll describe - and show pictures of - some of the significant additions that have been made available to programmers in the MFC Feature Pack for Visual C++ 2008.