Many many moons ago there was a CodeProject article about something called GuiToolkit which was an extension to MFC adding lots of modern bits and pieces (for the time) like the Office 2003 look.
It had lots of nice little features that people could use in their MFC apps. Things like the flashy new icon menus and docking windows. I found it a little heavy going looking at the code but it was interesting at least.
The writer of GuiToolkit has just published a new article called Pretty WinAPI Class and covers a modern looking GUI interface by wrapping the Win32 API. It has nice looking menus, docking windows and lots of other good looking tools. The source looks very similar to MFC in some respects, but it seems to do the job nicely providing the "modern Windows look" since Microsoft does not see fit to provide the common controls for this in a lot of areas.
You can see the homepage for all of these projects here.
