re: Minor heart attacks with x64 and Multithreading

Shahar Prish - MSFT — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 02:16:54 GMT

Every run-in I had with MFC resulted in heart-ache. More than any other technology. Granted, I stopped using it about 6 years ago, and since then MFC7 and 8 came out - so I cannot comment about them.

Just to give a couple of very small examples..
1. We had a relatively big app written in MFC back in 1997 (fraud detection on international #7 operators). The front-end was written in MFC and would communicate with the backend via sockets. We used CSocket to facilitate the communications on the frontend side. We ran into insane problems which were incredibly hard to debug. At the end, we realized that CSocket was, in some cases, bound to the thread from which it was created and in some cases would use the TLS to grab information it needed. It worked.. Most of the time, because the information happened to be the same on some threads. But it was not documented anywhere that the classes were bound to threads.

2. In 1998, I started writing an MFC ActiveX that was used in a much larger application. I also wrote numerous ATL ActiveXs and we even had a VB6 control or two. Throughout the whole time, the MFC implementation was, by far, the one that gave us the most grief and was incredibly hard to debug (though the VB one was harder to debug, it also gave us way less trouble though).

I have had many other problems with it - I was using it heavily from ~1996 to 2000 or so - enough problems to make me actually afraid of it.

Dont get me wrong - for very simple UI apps I would not tell people not to use it, but for anything that is even marginally complex... No thanks. "A burnt child dreads the fire."

When using ATL, for example, I can tell you that 1/2 my serious/unsolveable problems were due to me using the thing incorrectly, agaisnt the docs and 1/2 my problems were due to ATL's problems. With MFC, the percentages are much more on MFCs side.

On the bright side, MFC was much better written than OWL. :) At least it did not use overrided += and *= for building menu entries!

!!!!!!! DISCLAIMER !!!!!!!!
As I said at the top, I am mainly talking about MFC4.x (I also did a bit of MFC2.0 back in.. 94?) I dont know how good/bad MFC7/8 is.

re: Minor heart attacks with x64 and Multithreading

tzagotta — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 00:37:02 GMT

Why does MFC scare you. Lots of MS development tool customers use that for their critical applications all day long.