Hello, I’m Pat Brenner, a developer on the Visual C++ Libraries team. In this blog post I want to share some information about the Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) Library, and in particular the support of the multi-byte character set (MBCS) in MFC.

MFC has many features that support building desktop apps, and MFC has supported both Unicode and MBCS for many years. However, because Unicode is so popular, and because our research shows significantly reduced usage of MBCS, we are deprecating MBCS support in MFC for Visual Studio 2013. This keeps MFC more closely aligned with the Windows SDK itself, because many of the newest controls and messages are Unicode only. A warning to this effect has been added to MFC, so when an application is built using MBCS, a deprecation warning is issued. This warning can be eliminated by adding the NO_WARN_MBCS_MFC_DEPRECATION preprocessor definition to your project build definitions.

MFC is a very large library and its binary components (static and dynamic libraries and PDBs) form a large part of the total size of the Visual C++ product. The size of the MFC libraries substantially increases both download size and install time (in full install and update scenarios). In part this is because there are so many flavors of the MFC libraries: Debug/Release, Unicode/MBCS, Static/Dynamic. To address this, the MBCS libraries will only be available via a separate download, which is available here.

The goal is to remove MBCS support entirely in a subsequent release. MFC would then support only Unicode. We are interested in hearing feedback about this decision, so if you have comments, please take the time to leave a response to this article. Are you using MBCS in MFC? If so, what is the reason, and is there a reason you have not converted your application to Unicode?

We’re committed to supporting MFC and making sure that applications built with MFC will run on future Windows platforms. I hope you find this information useful and reassuring.

Pat Brenner, Visual C++ Libraries Development Team