Customer Reviews

Building Better Interfaces with Microsoft Foundation Classes

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I found this an excellent book for adding the final polish to my apps. I thought the author did a great job of sticking to the basic steps of manipulating the controls, screen, and other parts of the user interface. The book showed me how to add a lot of little touches to my programs that I'd seen, but never learned how to use. Things like tool tips, animated sequences, bitmapped buttons, etc. I also found the information on inserting the Date-Time control very useful and timely. Also, the info on the other new common controls was most helpful...

While not everyone is on the same level in terms of development experience, if you are getting up to speed with Visual C++ and want to give your apps that professional look, I heartily recommend this book.

--Jack

The book is well structured and the topics are very interesting. However, some controls are too briefly explained (i.e. TrackBar, Header) and owner-drawing techniques are not fully used. For instance, I was expecting a section on creating a flat-look style for command buttons, how to draw your own menus with bitmaps,etc... I think the author should have exploited this terrific idea of MFC UI more efficiently and should have gone deeper. Mr. Bugg leaves you craving for more UI knowledge and techniques. After all, on the back cover it does say "..here is the first complete guide..."

Having reached a plateau in my understanding of MFC, I needed a resource to step me through the process of building and implementing owner-drawn controls, self-drawn controls, and implementing advanced user interfaces with MFC. This book was one of the ones I reached for, hoping it would provide some insight on those subjects.

It didn't. Nothing extreme or truly advanced here, it certainly isn't the "complete guide."

This book only covers the basics, and glances over owner-drawn controls. Self-drawn controls are only mentioned indirectly. Subclassing is explained in relation to edit controls (with an example). Due to the lack of depth, you will read some sections of the book wanting more, and end up looking at the source code examples.

The bulk of Bugg's book is focused on presenting the same information you can get from other books, albeit with a slightly better explanation and a little more depth (it explains the various options, and provides examples), in one singular volume.

I do like the layout. A chapter is dedicated to each control or resource: buttons, edit controls, listboxes, checklist boxes, status bars, combo boxes, toolbars, and the new common controls are covered, and are reasonably well explained. Also, the common dialogs are also presented. If you want to refresh your memory on something, like the common file dialog, you just go to that chapter. This means you can avoid having to thumb through several chapters like other MFC books.

Bugg also includes some neat tricks. However, I would point out that the code on pages 324 - 325 is unnecessary to add a beveled separator to a dialog. All you have to do is draw a picture box on your dialog with a width of 1, and check off the "Sunken" and "Border" properties in the resource editor. No code is necessary.

I would say this book would be a worthwhile supplement to the mega-huge-all-in-one MFC books on the market which touches one every subject without really teaching you anything in particular. It would especially be useful for programmers in the beginner to intermediate range. It just isn't useful to me, aside from being a reference.