I need to do something which i expected to be was simple - create a tab control which has 2 tabs, implying 2 modes of operation for my app. When user clicks on Tab1, he'll be presented with some buttons and textboxes, and when he clicks Tab2, some other input method. I noticed that there was a CTabCtrl class thats used in MFC to add tabs. However, once I added the tab ctrl using the UI designer, I couldn't specify how many tabs there'll be using property window. Searching on the net, I found some examples but all of them required you to derive from CtabCtrl , create 2 or more child dialogs etc and to write your own custom class. My question is, since I want to do something so basic, why couldn't I do it using the familiar Add Event handler/Add member variable wizard and then handle everything else inside my app's class ? Surely, the default CTabCtrl class can do something useful without needing to derive from it ?
The MFC tab control is a pretty thin wrapper over the win32 tab control, which works in pretty much the way you describe. It is a window, which provides switching between child windows using tabs. As it happens, in straight win32 this is the most useful way for it to work. If you want to do something more sophisticated than switching between individual windows, you do this by using child dialogs. MFC doesn't do a great deal to help you, but deriving from CTabCtrl and using child dialogs is really not very difficult to do, although if you're used to the way WinForms does tab controls it does seem unnecessary.
If you want the tab control at the root of the dialog, with no other controls along side it, you might want to look at CPropertySheet (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/d3fkt014(VS.80).aspx) which is probably simpler to use. Unless you want to use any of the wizard functionality you don't even need to derive from it - you just create a couple of child dialog classes, then in the place where you want to create the property sheet, make an object, add the pages to it and invoke it.
Forget about CTabCtrl and use CMFCTabCtrl which is much easier to work with (this is assuming you are working on VS2008 SP1).
Failing that, you seem to misunderstand how the tab control works. It only provides the 'tab strip' at the top and sends messages when the user clicks on another one. It doesn't provide you with 'tab canvases' on which you can put controls. Showing and hiding the controls on the tab is something that the programmer needs to take care of. The resource editor provides little support there. Like Stewart says, the most common way of working is to have child dialogs in your tab and hide all of them except the one of the current tab.
You don't need to derive from CTabCtrl, you can also implement the switching behavior in the window that is the parent of the CTabCtrl.