CFormView

Why should I use a CFormView rather than a dialog box, what are the additional fetures coming with it

If I'm thinking of the same thing you are, you get a menu, toolbar and status bar for free.

You also get the printing features and help stubs.

What about the serailization,will I have a chance with the serialization also

Yes, if it's an SDI or MDI app, you get serialization stubs too.
Using the CFormView gives you the option of adding controls as you would with a dialog. I don't think you lose anything by going with a CFormView.

I have a CFormView based application here at work (that I'm writing).

> You also get the printing features

I just ran into a particular "mis-feature" of CFormView which puts this statement into some doubt. I have a multi-view app where I used CFormView for a number of my views (because each contains only a single window-size ActiveX control, and ClassWiz makes ActiveX event mapping easy within form views). When I started hooking up printing for the first CFormView-based view I got this [annoying!] debug output:

"Warning: CFormView does not support printing.\n"

which you can find in the MFC surce code VIEWFORM.CPP, in OnDraw() :

// do nothing - dialog controls will paint themselves,
// and Windows dialog controls do not support printing
#ifdef _DEBUG
if (pDC->IsPrinting())
TRACE0("Warning: CFormView does not support printing.\n");
#endif


;-(

Which, of course, begs the question - is it really that rare to want to print form views? ( No, the ActiveX controls in my views aren't text-based or database-based ).