MFC is a patchwork of old (and in many cases non-existing) design, backward-compatibility fixes, API limitations, bad documentation, and bugfixes. Just to take a few examples:
- The OnVScroll() method which is called when a window's vertical scrollbar changes only gets the position as a 16-bit integer. 32-bit integers are supported, but you need to call GetScrollInfo() to get it.
- OnVScroll() gets a pointer to a CScrollBar control, but this pointer is unusable (and in most cases NULL). Instead, you need to call GetScrollInfo() to get a reference to the scrollbar.
- CListCtrl can be used as a "virtual listview", i.e. you specify the number of lines and a callback which is invoked each time the view needs the data for a given row. Useful when you need a large number of rows and fetch data on demand (such as displaying memory contents). However, it refuses to use more than 100 million elements. And, yes, this is then power-of-ten kind of million, not the power-of-two you might have expected in case the widget uses a part of the 32 bit index integer for tagging or such. And all documentation on this, including web articles and code samples consider 100 million to be "huge" and "enormous". If you have a 32-bit integer as index, why can't I have 2^32 entries in the view.
- You can't set CListCtrl's vertical position by setting the position on the scrollbar.
- If you want to change colors in individual cells in a CListCtrl(), you must implement your own drawing function from scratch. There is no way to enhance the list control's own implementation. You might as well reimplement the entire list control from scratch (which many people seem to have done.)
- There is no way (short of black magic and sacrificing green goats) to get CListView to use another implementation of CListCtrl. There are lots of variants of CListCtrl on the web, but exchanging the one ClistView uses is easier said than done.
- I needed to add a text-display window below my CListView which was to display details about the selected row. This required 4 (!) extra classes with ~500 LOC. Compare this to XMonad, a tiling X11 window manager implemented in about the same amount of code. But they used Haskell, not MFC. ;-)
