Class Library Overview
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The latest version of this topic can be found at Class Library Overview.
This overview categorizes and describes the classes in the Microsoft Foundation Class Library (MFC) version 9.0. The classes in MFC, taken together, constitute an application framework — the framework of an application written for the Windows API. Your programming task is to fill in the code that is specific to your application.
The library's classes are presented here in the following categories:
The section General Class Design Philosophy explains how the MFC Library was designed.
For an overview of the framework, see Using the Classes to Write Applications for Windows. Some of the classes listed above are general-purpose classes that can be used outside of the framework and provide useful abstractions such as collections, exceptions, files, and strings.
To see the inheritance of a class, use the Class Hierarchy Chart.
In addition to the classes listed in this overview, the MFC Library contains a number of global functions, global variables, and macros. There is an overview and detailed listing of these in the topic MFC Macros and Globals, which follows the alphabetical reference to the MFC classes.