Building MFC applications with Visual Studio .NET 2008 Express

For reasons best known to themselves, Microsoft really really don't want you to build traditional MFC-based applications with their new Developer Studio tools - if you want the free stuff, you gotta trade in those testicles and do things with .NET or .nothing.  None of the MFC libraries come in the latest Express (read: free) versions of Developer Studio, nor do such useful tools as RC and MIDL.

However...

You can get RC and MIDL from the Platform SDK.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E6E1C3DF-A74F-4207-8586-711EBE331CDC&displaylang=en

And you can get an old version of the MFC and ATL libraries from the Driver Development Kit.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/DevTools/ddk/default.mspx

though in true Microsoft style, those headers contain compile errors.

Line 1034 and 1036 of …\include\mfc42\afxwin1.inl will probably contain the following:
_AFXWIN_INLINE CMenu::operator==(const CMenu& menu) const
{ return ((HMENU) menu) == m_hMenu; }
_AFXWIN_INLINE CMenu::operator!=(const CMenu& menu) const
{ return ((HMENU) menu) != m_hMenu; }

which is incorrect – they generate error 4430. It should be:

_AFXWIN_INLINE BOOL CMenu::operator==(const CMenu& menu) const
{ return ((HMENU) menu) == m_hMenu; }
_AFXWIN_INLINE BOOL CMenu::operator!=(const CMenu& menu) const
{ return ((HMENU) menu) != m_hMenu; }

(And people blame Windows crashes on "bad drivers" - how hard can it be to write a driver when the DDK has such blatant errors - they literally cannot have tried to compile with these headers before shipping them)

Sadly, whats discussed here only works up to VC8.0 - at 9.0 the ATL changes are too drastic, as I found out the hard way.  If you want to use MFC or ATL, you can't use Visual Studio 2008 Express.