There is much, much MFC code written 15 years ago that still compiles without any changes today, with the latest versions of MFC. There is much to be said about

There is much, much MFC code written 15 years ago that still compiles without any changes today, with the latest versions of MFC. There is much to be said about Microsoft, but their development tools are top notch and robust, and for the long haul. There are MFC books that came out in 1998 and are still useful today because they contain the nitty gritty on what people ran into back then. Rather than changing everything, requiring much code to be updated, the issues are documented and people work around it. Is this nice? No, it's not, and I hated it when I was less experienced. Now, I love it - the time I spend learning them has paid off a hundred times over. On the other hand, I've used web frameworks (mostly Symfony but also a few others) that look awesome in the beginning, but that require major changes when an update needs to be made a year later, because the latest and greatest has changed and the old is no longer supported. And they all support 'plugins', but you're fucked when you use them - sometimes they're upgraded, sometimes not, but when you use a couple you're always stuck; you need to upgrade the framework to use the latest version of one plugin, but another one only works with the old version, so now you need to replace all uses of that plugin with another, and change all the code... Anyway that was a tangential rant, but Microsoft is really good at keeping a stable dev env, as long as you don't always use the first version of their new shinies (Windows Forms, ...)