Quote Originally Posted by ADSOFT
Well if you read this post, you will see why MFC is definatly not dead, and just might increase in popularity in the future.
That sounds as if in your opinion the masked edit control was the only benefit of the .NET framework. How about the auto layout controls, such as the table layout panel, the flow layout panel and the split panel? How about tool strip and menu strip containers? Automatic scrolling? How about the GDI+ for drawing (instead of the old-fashioned GDI)? Or the automatic use of offscreen bitmaps by simply setting a property value? Not to mention the power of reflection and CodeDOM, the Decimal data type, the full-fledged support for localization, the easy way of creating and using fonts, the almost automatic support for application settings, the extensible built-in XML and binary serialization support? Data binding? The incredibly improved handling of tree controls and list controls by finally exposing their items as objects instead of handles? I could go on like this for hours - and, as already said above: Although I have been using MFC since the very beginning, and MFC has been "my" domain for many years: After having used C# and .NET 2.0, I would never look back to MFC again. The possibility to mix MFC and .NET (as in the article you quoted) is a nice feature when you have to deal with legacy MFC code. But I will never start a new project based on MFC if I have the choice. The whole .NET world is soooo much more productive.

Again: All this doesn't mean that MFC is "dead". Nothing is dead - even assembly language still has its raison d'être where appropriate. However, with the advent of .NET, MFC and unmanaged C++ are technologies of the past. They will still be supported by Microsoft, they will even be developed further - but their importance for the mainstream of software development under Windows is steadily decreasing.