MFC Application

Your First MFC Application

It's time to build your first MFC application. And what better place to start than with one that displays "Hello, MFC" in a window? Based on the classic "Hello, world" program immortalized in Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie's The C Programming Language (1988, Prentice-Hall), this very minimal program, which I'll call Hello, demonstrates the fundamental principles involved in using MFC to write a Windows application. Among other things, you'll get a close-up look at MFC's CWinApp and CFrameWnd classes and see firsthand how classes are derived from them and plugged into the application. You'll also learn about the all-important CPaintDC class, which serves as the conduit through which text and graphics are drawn in a window in response to WM_PAINT messages. Finally, you'll be introduced to message mapping, the mechanism MFC uses to correlate the messages your application receives with the member functions you provide to handle those messages.

Figure 1-3 lists the source code for Hello. Hello.h contains the declarations for two derived classes. Hello.cpp contains the implementations of those classes. Among C++ programmers, it's traditional to put class definitions in .h files and source code in .cpp files. We'll honor that tradition here and throughout the rest of this book. For large applications containing tens or perhaps hundreds of classes, it's also beneficial to put class declarations and implementations in separate source code files. That's overkill for the programs in the first few chapters of this book, but later on, when we begin working with documents and views, we'll give each class its own .h and .cpp files. On the CD in the back of the book, in the folder named Chap01, you'll find a folder with copies of Hello.h and Hello.cpp as well as a folder containing a copy of the compiled executable (Hello.exe).

Figure 1-3. The Hello application.

Hello.h class CMyApp : public CWinApp { public: virtual BOOL InitInstance (); }; class CMainWindow : public CFrameWnd { public: CMainWindow (); protected: afx_msg void OnPaint (); DECLARE_MESSAGE_MAP () };

Hello.cpp #include <afxwin.h> #include "Hello.h" CMyApp myApp; / // CMyApp member functions BOOL CMyApp::InitInstance () { m_pMainWnd = new CMainWindow; m_pMainWnd->ShowWindow (m_nCmdShow); m_pMainWnd->UpdateWindow (); return TRUE; } / // CMainWindow message map and member functions BEGIN_MESSAGE_MAP