Question

We have a command line application that could benefit from a GUI. We want to add some plotting functionality and have identified a plotting library that uses MFC. Initially we developed a separate app, but we’d rather have the GUI in the same process space.

I was thinking of possibly a GUI in an MFC DLL that could be hosted in the production app AND in a testing app.

The questions are:

• What are the steps necessary to add an MFC GUI to a win32 command line app
• Is it possible to make a GUI in an MFC DLL and how can it be done? (so that different apps can reuse the same GUI)

EDIT

I should add that this is an unmanaged app (and needs to stay that way – it needs to be highly performant, makes extensive use of templates, boost, custom allocators, internally developed thread serialization, etc)

RESULTS:

Nick D’s answer worked great – especially the follow-up link in his comment with the details about a regular MFC DLL.

Note that we will be using Qt for the next iteration. Modifying our build environment and getting used to a a new framework was just too much this time around.

Answer 1

You can call/reuse GUI code in a dll. (I even use Delphi forms in my C++ projects)

A very simple dll example:

// The DLL exports foo() function
void foo()
{
    AFX_MANAGE_STATE( AfxGetStaticModuleState() );

    CDlgFoo dlg;
    dlg.DoModal();
}

In the console program you’ll have code like this:

h = ::LoadLibrary( "my.dll" );
::DisableThreadLibraryCalls( h ); 
pfoo = (foo_type*)::GetProcAddress( h, (const char*)1 );
if ( pfoo ) pfoo();