MFC Programming answers the hard questions by diving below the surface presented in the Reference Manual. For example, all types of controls are discussed, including the common controls, owner-draw controls using message reflection, and tool tips within a dialog. All of the common dialogs are described along with the the various methods of customization. Serialization is covered in depth, including serializing collections, reading and writing custom file formats, and using versionable schemas. Printing and previewing are described in detail, including printing of forms, scaling output to fit on a page, printing of headers and footers, and customization of the Page Setup dialog. Debugging strategies are explored, along with fixes to a few bugs encountered in MFC along the way.

The accompanying CD-ROM contains source code for all programs in the book, including:

• Window explorer, creates windows in a wide variety of styles
• Control sampler, illustrates all of the Windows controls including the common controls
• Word processor, built using the rich-text control and all of the common dialogs
• Graphics application, a line-drawing program written without using the document/view framework
• MDI application, a graphical and textual application written using document/view that illustrates multiple status bars, split and scrolled views, and serialization of objects and data
• Hangman game, a sophisticated use of a dynamic dialog
• Address book, a multi-paned form-based front-end to a database
• Wizard installer, a setup program that shows how to create wizard-mode property sheets
• a DLL-based application, illustrates extension and resource DLLs
• an Internet client, integrates MFC's Internet classes with the document/view framework.