ATL and MFC changes and fixes in Visual Studio 2013

August 20th, 2013

Hello, I’m Pat Brenner, a developer on the Visual C++ Libraries team. In this blog post I would like to share with you the changes that we’ve made in ATL and MFC for Visual Studio 2013.

One of the major changes we made was to eliminate the ATL DLL altogether. All ATL code is now static, either in the header files or in the ATL static library. We also reduced the amount of code in the ATL static library substantially, so there are no longer multiple static libraries for debug/release mode or Unicode/ANSI character set. There is only one ATL static library that is common to all configurations.

The changes to ATL also included the elimination of the ATL/MFC Trace Tool and the simplification of the tracing mechanism. The TRACE macros now essentially boil down to OutputDebugString, and there is no external controller of tracing level (like the trace tool provided)—the tracing level is set in the application itself. This does cause source-breaking changes in some uses of the ATL::CTraceCategory class, which will require changes in source code when migrating to Visual Studio 2013.

The major change we made in MFC was the deprecation of MBCS support (see more information in this separate blog post).

In addition, we fixed about 105 bugs in MFC and about 60 bugs in ATL. About one-fourth of these bugs (in both libraries) were reported by customers.

Though I cannot provide a complete list of the bugs in our internal bug database, here is a list of the bugs that were reported by customers through our Connect site that have been fixed in ATL and MFC for Visual Studio 2013 RTM. Click on any Connect bug number to see more information about that bug. Note that most of these bugs were fixed for the Preview release as well.

Connect # Bug Title 710163 atlbase.h disables no longer existing C4217 warning 714790 Useless line of code in AtlSafeRealloc() 714791 AtlSafeRealloc() treats failures inconsistently and this leads to memory leaks 714840 CAtlServiceModuleT::LogEventEx() contains a useless check 714802 Suspicious error handling code in CAtlExeModuleT::StartMonitor() 742895 CComApartment::Apartment() leaks objects on edge cases 736213 ATL::CComSafeArray::operator[] ambiguity 764800 wrong/missing sal annotations on consumer oledb macros 750369 Breaking change in how the ATL OLE DB CCommand::Execute method behaves 774871 Certification fails for Windows Store App with ATL-based library 785396 Uninstalling VS2012 Update 2 and repair of VS results in ATL files missing. 789669 ATL CRBMap::Lookup code analysis markup issue 790309 VC++11 regression: error C2338: db_command using v110 toolset 745790 Static MFC executables produced by Visual Studio 2012 RC are huge 750838 MFC loads DLLs using LoadLibraryEx with flag only supported on Windows8 757588 CMFCRibbonBar::AddToTabs removes a wrong button from the m_arButtons array 763947 EndDialog in OnInitDialog reopen Dialog 763517 IMPLEMENT_DYNAMIC produces compile error for statically linked MFC projects 768378 CMFCTabCtrl bug 769093 MFC Edit Browse box not showing browse button. 772859 Calling EndDialog() within OnInitDialog() causes the dialog to be displayed twice. 750859 Visual Studio 11 Beta – bug running .exe in XP service pack 3 763474 Errors detected in the Visual C++ 2012 libraries 760371 LocalFree called twice in CDatabase (MFC 11) 710858 MFC OLE-Server doesn’t seem to support the new style MFC Toolbars 773463 Attempting to use DrawStatusText after including afxwin.h results in link error 768257 Probems with CRecordset::GetFieldValue(short nIndex, CDBVariant& varValue) in VS2012 772549 x64 MFC Macro Bug – ON_WM_POWERBROADCAST() / CWnd::OnPowerBroadcast 773448 CHttpFile::QueryInfo() returns “corrupted” CStrings with invalid lengths. 778201 Missing MFC Functions 777604 CWnd::GetScrollLimit returns 1 if scrolling is deactivated 781179 CMFCPopupMenu crash when you click outside while submenu still open 781379 CMFCShellTreeCtrl fails to handle some UNC pathnames correctly 781257 MFC – CMFCTabCtrl – when style is STYLE_3D_VS2005 and SetActiveTabBoldFont() is set 789970 Unpaired pragma warning push/pop in afxwin.h in Release build 790246 MFC: bad hard typecast in CMFCToolBarMenuButton::CompareWith 790975 HTTP_QUERY_FLAG_REQUEST_HEADERS on CHttpFile::QueryInfo() asserts wrongly 792003 CMFCShellListCtrl::OnContextMenu ‘Delete’ context menu handler does not work

I hope you find this information useful. Please let us know if you have any questions.

Pat Brenner, Visual C++ Libraries Development Team