Object Windows Library (OWL), designed for use with Borland's Turbo C++ compiler, was a competing product introduced by Borland around the same time. The Community edition of Visual Studio, introduced in 2014, however, includes MFC. As such, it is not included in the freeware Visual C++ Express. MFC was initially a feature of the commercial versions of Visual Studio. The update features new user interface constructs, including the ribbons and associated UI widgets, fully customizable toolbars, docking panes which can either be freely floated or docked to any side and document tabs. On April 7, 2008, Microsoft released an update to the MFC classes as an out-of-band update to Visual Studio 2008 and MFC 9. MFC 9.0 was released with Visual Studio 2008. MFC 8.0 was released with Visual Studio 2005. The name Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) was adopted too late in the release cycle to change these references. During early development, what became MFC was called 'Application Framework Extensions' and abbreviated 'Afx'. One quirk of MFC is the use of 'Afx' as the prefix for many functions, macros and the standard precompiled header name 'stdafx.h'.

Many of those functions share their names with corresponding API functions. Instead, programs create objects from Microsoft Foundation Class classes and call member functions belonging to those objects. In an MFC program, direct Windows API calls are rarely needed.

C++ was just beginning to replace C for development of commercial application software at the time. MFC was introduced in 1992 with Microsoft's C/C++ 7.0 compiler for use with 16-bit versions of Windows as an extremely thin object-oriented C++ wrapper for the Windows API. While Microsoft has introduced alternative application frameworks since then, MFC remains widely used. MFC was introduced by Microsoft in 1992 and quickly gained widespread use. Microsoft Foundation Class Library (MFC) is a C++ object-oriented library for developing desktop applications for Windows.

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