Do MFC programs only work on Computers with VS 6?

[ChimpFace9000]

An MFC program will run on any computer that has the mfc dll's installed. And mainly only computers with VC++ on it, has em. I suggest you learn to program for real and learn the api.

[Yonatan]

You have three options regarding MFC usage in your project. (You can hit Alt+F7 to open a dialog where you can choose)

1. Use MFC as a shared DLL. This requires that MFC42.DLL be present at the system directory (usually C:\Windows\System or C:\WinNT\System32).
2. Use MFC as a statically-linked library. This doesn't require any external DLLs, but a simple "Hello, world!" program weighs around a full megabyte.
3. Do not use MFC. WOO!

Conclusion: MFC suckass, Win32 API kickass!

[parksie]

As an alternative, you can also use WTL -- the Windows Template Library. This is for VC++6 only, and comes with the Platform SDK.

[highlife]

using the statically linking library worked. thanks.

and also my program is alot more than a hello world and it still only is about 38KB compiled, so i guess you were wrong about that.

Chimpface considering that my class is called Programming Windows with MFC, i would think just using the API instead wouldn't make alot of sense, what do you think??

[parksie]

Well...we didn't know what your class was, we were merely suggesting the best way to go about things

And a quickie test of a release-mode program:
DLL - 50K
Static - 443K

No contest

[Yonatan]

By the way... EXEs compiled in VC++ 6 are much bigger than VC++ 5 compiled EXEs, but you can add the option /OPT:NOWIN98 (VC++ 6 only) to make the EXE size closer to the size compiled with VC++ 5.
There was an article about this in some Microsoft page by Matt Pietrek (I think) but I lost the URL.

#pragma comment(linker, "/OPT:NOWIN98")
// to pretend it's a change in the code :rolleyes:

[parksie]

That's weird

Also there's a technical article on MSDN about the TINYCRT library; well nice