Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave in a remote part of the earth, Microsoft has inundated
you with news of .NET by now. Microsoft’s marketing machine is working overtime, as usual,
to ensure you don’t miss their latest and greatest product. If you listen to the Microsoft hype,
it seems that they expect everyone to drop billions (trillions?) of lines of code and adopt
.NET tomorrow. What the hype doesn’t mention is that adopting .NET completely means
starting from scratch.
The real world is a different place than the fantasyland of Microsoft hype. In the real world,
developers have to maintain existing code at the lowest possible cost and still produce new
applications in record time. The task seems impossible when you have two completely
different technologies to develop these applications. On the one hand, you have the realm of
MFC and the Win32 API. On the other hand, you have the new .NET Framework. Which do
you choose for a given task?
Answering the question of which technology to use is one of the biggest problems this book
will tackle. We’ll discuss how to use the old, the new, and, most importantly, the mixed
environments of Visual C++ .NET. Knowing when .NET can actually help you create an
application faster is the key to managing application development in an environment where
you have two different architectures to consider.
