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What are some techniques for migrating a large MFC application to WPF/.NET?

Asked 2009-05-07T19:20:02.737
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I am currently working on a very large legacy MFC MDI application. It has a large number of UI elements - dockable toolbars, custom tree controls, context menus, etc. It is an image processing application so the main views render themselves using DirectX and OpenGL. The product is about 10 years old and one of the priorities here is to update the look and feel of it.

Knowing that Microsoft has done a good job of providing interoperability between C++/MFC and .NET I thought it would make sense to migrate the code base incrementally. What I'm struggling with now is where to start.

One approach is to rip out the MFC framework with WPF and reuse as much of the C++ code as we can. This will let us maximize the benefits of the WPF architecture but will mean a long development period until we're fully functional again.

Another approach is to replace MFC controls one at a time with their WPF counterparts. This will allow us to work incrementally. My concern with this approach is that it means there will be an awful lot of connection points between managed and unmanaged code and I'm not sure where to start with replacing things like the main menu and toolbars.

Or is there another option here I'm not seeing?

Any suggestions or links to information on this topic would be appreciated.

Update: DavidK raised some excellent questions so I'm adding the motivations behind this.

1) Future development of the product

This product is still being actively developed with new features getting added on a regular basis. I thought that it would make a lot of sense to try and slowly migrate towards C#/WPF. In my limited experience with C#/WPF I found the productivity gains to be amazing over working in C++/MFC.

The other big thing we're getting with WPF is the ability to take advantage of multi-head systems. MFC applications are limited to a single top level frame, making it ve

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I don't think there's an easier way that you've not covered, although it will probably depend quite a bit on how well separated the underlying logic is from the UI layer.

Without wishing to seem negative: are you sure that this will be worth the effort? If I were writing a large application from scratch I wouldn't start with C++ and MFC now, but seeing where you are, what will you really gain from rewriting it? Will that add a single new feature that users will pay for? Are there any users you'll cut off who won't be able to run the new version? I can't help suspecting you'll get a much bigger return on investment from looking at some relatively simple things you could do to improve the appearance of the application as it is. For example, does it have an XP-style manifest so that common controls get the XP look? Would a few days spent updating bits (e.g. using the new style file dialogs) get you most of the way to a shiny new look? Bear in mind that even the newest, shiniest Office 2007 was implemented by Microsoft with ordinary Win32 controls.

answered 2009-05-08T10:32:09.817

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