How to differentiate between MFC Classes and User-defined classes

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I am learning MFC. If I am not wrong, the names of all the MFC classes start with the capital letter "C" (e.g. CFrameWnd, CFile, CMenu, etc.)

I found that the code generated by the Visual Studio wizard for MFC based project gives similar names to the user-defined classes. For example, if I name my project as "Shapes" then, the classes generated for the project contains classes such as CShapesApp, CMainFrame, CChildView, etc.

In the end, you would have several classes in your project, which may look like CShapesApp, CFrameWnd, CMainFrame, CWinApp, CWnd, etc.

QUESTIONS: For me, the names of the classes (user-defined and MFC library) seem quite similar and hard to differentiate if it is a user-defined class or an MFC library class.

  • Why MFC based projects choose such naming conventions (i.e. why to put "C" in front of the user-defined classes)?

  • How can I easily differentiate between MFC library classes and user-defined classes?

UPDATE: I know that I can change the names and I have already tried that. But the general convention is to start the class names with "C" even for the user-defined classes and my question is why? and how can I differentiate easily?

mfc windows
2 Answers

Why MFC based projects choose such naming conventions (i.e. why to put "C" in front of the user-defined classes)?

That's impossible to answer. At a guess, that was just the common thing to do, back in the early 90's. Namespaces were added to C++ in 1995, i.e. years after work on MFC had started, so MFC wound up in the global namespace. Using a C prefix for classes reduces the chance for symbols to clash with the Windows API and SDK headers.

How can I easily differentiate between MFC library classes and user-defined classes?

MFC classes are user-defined classes. It is not immediately clear, why you need to differentiate between user-defined classes provided by MFC and user-defined classes provided by your code. If you find this useful, there's no shortcut. You just have to memorize which ones belong to MFC.

There are, however, 2 sets of classes in MFC, for which it is helpful to know, which set they are in: The 'original' classes, and the classes introduced with Visual Studio 2008 (I believe), that offer a wider set of functionality. You can distinguish between those sets by looking at the prefix: The 'original' classes start with C (like CButton), and the updated classes have a CMFC prefix (like CMFCButton).

user_18893290

The "C" prefix convention is a question of your taste. But remind, all MFC-derived classes "are" in fact MFC classes - in the sense of inheritance meaning a derived class "is" also the ancestor. So don't forget your CWnd-derived CMyWnd has everything a CWnd also has. My personal approach for naming (which I introduced in several dev teams) is to use the "C" prefix for all MFC-derived classes and use another one (or even none) on non-MFC-derived classes.

user_120642690
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