Mfc and Gdiplus

[albertino80]

For the next VC, is there something new about MFC and GdiPlus stuff?

[Damien Watkins]

Hello

So I was fortunate enough to present on this topic recently at our PDC: you can find a video here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC26/

As you probably know, we recently released (VS2008 SP1) a major update to MFC, you can find details on this here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2008/12/04/ctaskdialog-an-alternative-to-the-simple-message-box.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2007/11/09/announcing-a-major-mfc-update-plus-tr1-support.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2007/11/09/quick-tour-of-new-mfc-functionality.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2007/03/21/mfc-updates-for-vista-common-controls.aspx

In summary, after a period of slight neglect, we have heard “loud and clear” that many developers use MFC and so we have embarked on a number of projects recently. We are planning to deliver more in VC10 but our libraries teams was focused on the VS2008 SP1 Update for a period and then were initial working on other libraries at the start of VC10, so there is little to see in the CTP. In the video I speak about a number of features were are currently evaluating, including D2D which coincides with the second part of your question, however at this stage there is nothing new to play with in the CTP. Overall we do hear that developers would like to move from GDI(+) to DirectX (D2D) and we are looking at providing D2D support in MFC in some form.

Let me ask the reverse question, what would you most like to see?

Thanks
Damien

[Marc G]

First let me say that I really like the new updated MFC, it finally allows us to write more modern looking user interfaces instead of the pre y2k look and feel :)

The only thing that I'm complaining about while playing with VC2010 CTP was that the built-in toolbar editor still only supports 16 color toolbars :( 16 colors, that's from last century... but that's a bit offtopic...

To have some kind of support for D2D and maybe DirectWrite from MFC would be pretty interesting.