I have a confusion that MSWord is a MDI or SDI application. Looking at the Application, I do believe that it is a SDI application but there are people who strongly “believe” that its an example of MDI. After using the Taskmanager in windows, the Applications tab list all all the instances of the Documents currently opened. However there is only one process in the Processes tab.
Since all the documents have same process, it make me feel its an MDI. But at the same time, the Applications tab lists all the documents opened make methink its an SDI. What do you people think about this? Please give your valuable and detailed answers.
I came across some more info regarding this from Chris Ryan which I am sharing here:
It depends on what you mean by MDI.
MS-Word does have multiple documents and an interface but it does not fit the classic definition of an MDI application because it does not use an MDICLIENT window class to manage the child frames.
For an example of an MDICLIENT, see:
ftp://ftp.charlespetzold.com/ProgWin5/Chap19/MDIDemo/MDIDemo.c .
ftp://ftp.charlespetzold.com/ProgWin5/Chap19/MDIDemo/Release/MDIDemo.exe
Even the older versions of Word and Excel that had the child windows inside the main frame, were technically not MDI. They looked like it but they did not use MDICLIENT. MS used a proprietary windowing library called Software Dialog Manager. SDM was used so a common application code base could be used on multiple platforms: Windows, OS/2, & Mac. All they had to do was recompile for that platform and link a platform specific SDM library.
This link talks a little about SDM but does not mention MDICLIENT
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd317997(v=vs.85).aspx