Are you trying to force MFC into Express edition. Every other attempt I've seen to add MFC to Express has either ended in failure or the programmer getting Visual Studio Standard in one way or the other. Trying to shoehorn MFC into Express is not only dangerous, you risk infringing on your EULA for Visual Studio. Let's say you started to integrate MFC into Express now. How long will it take? 50 man-hours? 100 man-hours (there's a lot of code to alter)? Let's go for the lower number, for fairness. Now let's assume you're a low paid Junior developer that earns $15 an hour (you need to be an expert/experienced developer to know how to port MFC, but once again, let's assume for fairness), the time you lose by having to add MFC to express edition is 50 hours: 50 * 15 = $750. You've just cost you and your company $750.00. To compare, Visual Studio Standard costs less than $270 at Amazon. For the time you lost shoehorning MFC into Express edition, you could have bought two copies of Visual Studio Standard! To conclude, forcing MFC to work in Express edition is not only a waste of time, it's a waste of money!