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Building an MDI Interface with Windows Forms

Many traditional desktop applications that deal with documents provide a multiple document interface (MDI) to allow the user to work with multiple documents simultaneously. The MDI interface is implemented in MFC using the CMDIFrameWnd and CMDIChildWnd classes. Using Windows Forms, all the functionality for all window types, including the MDI frame window and child windows, is provided in the System::Windows::Forms::Form class.

Creating an MDI interface with Windows Forms starts with the same steps you followed to create the SimpleWindowsForm in the previous section. Start by creating a C++ managed application named MDIWindowsForms and copy the code from Listing 7.3 into the new MDIWindowsForms.cpp ...