Steve Teixeira, Microsoft’s Director of Partner Strategy for Visual C++, has some advice to Visual C++ developers on choosing between MFC and .NET WinForms.
The thing to notice here is that, for the most part, Microsoft has always chosen to use neither MFC nor WinForms for its own application development.
Steve suggests we use .NET for XML, cryptography or security, but there are excellent solutions in all these areas which don’t mandate using .NET.
Microsoft knows it can be more competitive by writing most of its code to the Win32 API, or using class libraries which offer better performance and/or flexibility than MFC.