The previous chapter introduced you to the steps necessary to build programs that use the Microsoft Foundation Class Library. This chapter assumes that you have successfully installed the Microsoft Foundation Class Library on your system and have read the previous chapter.
In this and the rest of the tutorial chapters, you will learn how to use the components of the library in the design of your programs. You will see how the built-in functionality of the Microsoft Foundation Classes can reduce the code that you have to write to realize the goals of your programs. This chapter emphasizes the Microsoft Foundation Class Library's “collection” classes in particular.
This chapter describes how to use Microsoft Foundation Classes to create a data model for a simple name and phone number database program. The purpose of the chapter is to demonstrate how the component classes from the Microsoft Foundation Class Library can help you design at a high level of abstraction and greatly simplify the implementation of your design.Use of the Microsoft Foundation Class Library for Microsoft Windows programming is covered in the next four chapters. This chapter explains the non-Windows classes of the Microsoft Foundation Class Library.