Why aren't simple things easy to do in MFC?  Everybody I have talked to about this agrees.  Take, for instance, changing the background color of a button, displaying a bitmap in the background of a dialog box, writing simple text to a printer, or appending text to a CEdit control.  The one that always gets on my nerves is the color and image thing in windows.  I mean why can't I just mark a button as an Icon button and then select the icon I want to apply to it graphically.  Instead, you must mark it as an icon button and then go into the init function of the dialog box and load the icon and apply it to the button.  Here's another example, today I wrote code to write the contents of a CEdit out to a printer.  I had to worry about exactly how the text was laid out and what the capabilities of the printer are.  I really miss the old days of line printers when you just opened the printer file and wrote text to it and closed it when you were done.  Sure I can write prettier reports now, but it takes a whole lot longer and there is the possibility of so many more bugs.  I believe the user would be happier if I could produce less buggy software, more quickly, which means more affordable.