We won't build a dialog application just yet, but I will tell you enough here so that you get the picture of what's going on in dialog applications. Dialog apps are the simplest apps in my opinion. In the IDE, go to File, New, Projects, MFC AppWizard(exe), and type in a project name. Hit next. Select Dialog Application as the type of application and then hit finish. Next go to the File View. You will see the source files created automagically. You should be able to compile and run the application as it is. What is going on in all these files? Everything boils down to the CWinApp derived class and the CDialog derived class (which is derived from CWnd ). Look in the source file named after your project. You should see a the InitInstance() function there. Inside of that function you can see that a dialog class is constructed, it is set as the 'main window' of the application, and it is displayed with the DoModal() function. Once you exit your dialog app, the DoModal(...