Sounds like you want to use the timer in order to measure for how long your application has been running. For that you don't want to create a timer, because timers are used to give you callbacks in regular time intervals. Instead, you want to register the time at the start of your application, then at the end and then calculate the difference between these two values.
Function
time
lets you easily retrieve a current time value in seconds. So the subtraction of the two time values is also easy to do.
Another option would be to use MFC's
CTime
and
CTimeSpan
classes to do the same.
CTime t0 = CTime::GetCurrentTime();
...
CTime t1 = CTime::GetCurrentTime();
CTimeSpan tTotal = t1 - t0;
Hope that gets you up to speed.