Porting Windows MFC applications to
Linux
Novell Cool Solutions: Feature
By Bill Bodine
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Posted: 17 Aug 2004
Introduction
This article is designed to give some ideas and direction to developers who have been writing applications in a
Windows environment using the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) and who now recognize that they need
to support the Linux platform with their applications as well. Articles abound on the Internet that take up the
religious fervor of trying to persuade readers why they should develop to either MFC or the various Linux APIs.
I happily leave that argument to others. The assumption here is that the reader is not so much interested in the
marketing and religious wars, but that they accept that the Linux world represents a vast revenue potential for
them and so, irrespective of strengths or weaknesses between the two platforms, they must have their
application running on Linux to compete.
First off, it is important to recognize that the developer is going to have to make a choice as to which GUI
toolkit they will use when moving to Linux. It is not that different from the Windows developer who has had to
choose whether to use Microsoft's MFC or Borland's ObjectWindows Library (OWL), or some other vendor's
object libraries. While the options may be plentiful, a few of the options a Linux developer may choose
between that I will discuss in this article are
1) wxWidgets -- an open source, cross-platform, C++ GUI toolkit,
2) QT -- another cross-platform, C++ GUI toolkit developed by Trolltech, and
3) GTK+ - another cross-platform, 'C' based GUI toolkit.
A developer will likely choose any one of these toolkits for their application based on experience and
development preference rather than technical inadequacies that may exist. All three are available on the
SUSE distribution or from the SUSE SDK for end user and development purposes.
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