I personnally prefer the straight Win32 API to MFC. Granted, I am not very experienced in either, but it seems as if MFC saves little or now time. Than again, this could also just be because the MFC book I was reding, Ivor Horton''s Beginning Visual C++ 6 is God aweful and Petzold''s book is very well written.

MFC supplies two things: an application framework (the AF in AFX, they added the X just to be cool), and C++ wrappers for a lot of win32 objects to make design a little object-oriented. It uses lots of macros for its framework. The real benefit of the application framework is that it uses a heirarchy of linked lists to do message mapping instead of a big switch statement in your winproc, which is really cool. I also find the integration with the class wizard to be really handy for mapping dialog items to variables (DDX/DDV or whatever they call it). Other than that, MFC doesn''t do things any differently than you (probably) normally would for a cookie-cutter Windows program. It''s just that most of it''s set-up for you, so it''s really quick to develop for those kinds of programs.