In a visual studio C++ project, would MFC be faster than using the CLR? I'd specificily be using 2008.
Oh and the reason I ask is because I have experience with .NET but not so much with MFC. I understand what MFC is but have never really used it much.
If you are talking about a Visual C++ project with /clr enabled, then definitely one without /clr will be faster. However, a Visual C++ project without /clr can be outrun by a Visual C# project in some cases(some cases: not all of them) mainly because of the optimizations that can be done at the CLR layer.
In that case, I can say - work with what you know.
.net (winforms) is not lesser compared to MFC (unless you are doing something that requires platform support).
If you're referring to dev time, if you have experience with .NET and the runtime environment requirements are not a concern, you're probably better off doing a CLR project of some sort. MFC has a fairly steep learning curve, and .NET experience is fairly easy to translate cross-language.
If you're talking about runtime speed, MFC (native code) will almost certainly be faster.