How to support many document types in MFC like MS office applications or Visual studio

Question

How to make my MFC application support multiple document types like MS Office and Visual Studio, When you click new file a window with all types supported will appear to choose from it and then open the appropriate document/view. I'm not Experienced in MFC Document/View architecture. most of books I've read don't cover this part. they all are the same on the Document/View they cover the basics with drawing some triangles, circles, squares. I want to master the mfc document/view architecture, what is the best book or tutorial for that?

Another thing is How to Create an MDI application that don't support the document/view and [it has no deal with documents] it deals with database for example the mdi childs are forms with controls , how to do that in C# it was easy set the parent as mdi parent and the mdi child, show, it will appear normally how this can be achieved in mfc? what type of dialog to use.

Answer 1

There's no magic involved, just a lot of work. If you want to support document types X, Y and Z, you need to figure out which models you need to represent them. Similar document types may share similar models. E.g. in Visual Studio, a VB.Net solution and a C# solution may share the same model, since both are .Net solutions. Yet native C++ may require a different model. (Remember that models, being classes, can inherit from base classes, so you can effectively share similar code).