I created an application in VS 2008 Express as an MFC app just to take advantage of the easy GUI creation. I might re-do this app in pure win32 since no other MFC classes are used (just a button and a text box, the button fires off the main program, all win32). My only question that determines whether I stay in MFC or port it over to pure win32 is this:
How difficult is it to deploy an MFC app? What do I need to do (in VS 2008) to make sure it works on another machine?
Statically link MFC and it’s just another .exe.
You can just give that to the user or create an installer with either the microsoft .msi tool or a regular setup.exe with something like innosetup.
Edit – the error message in your comment is about another dll that is part of a 3rd party library. You can’t (easily) take a DLL and incorporate it into your app. the licensing may also require you to ship their DLL as a separate lib.