Creating Windows GUIs with C++

[slavik262]

It gets better and better.

[TimCraig]

Originally Posted by slavik262

It gets better and better.

While the fundamentals of writing Windows applications is relatively straightforward, it's all the arcane gotchas that take a long time to come across and learn so you can be really good. If you're looking for a C++ framework, I'd go with MFC to start. There's good Wizard support in Visual Studio and lots of help available on the Web. There are literally thousands of examples to be had. www.codeproject.com is a very good source of both information and examples. One comment about examples though, the ones provided directly by Microsoft are horrible and you'd be better off never looking at them.

Another good choice for a C++ framework is WTL, Windows Template Library. It was originally developed as a side project within Microsoft to be what MFC was not, a object oriented C++ solution. Since it uses templates heavily, it's probably not that easy for a beginner to get up to speed on. It was never officially supported by Microsoft and is now an open source at Source Forge. It's what I'm currently using for what little Windows programming I do these days.

[slavik262]

So much for being able to distribute just my executable.

However, I really appreciate you guys. Awesome help. This really shows how awesome FIRST (and CD) are.

[TimCraig]

Originally Posted by slavik262

So much for being able to distribute just my executable.

Oh, that's one advantage of WTL I forgot to mention. WTL requires no additional DLLs unless you explicitly decide to link to additional libraries. And in that case you know what you require. Also, your application can be quite small since you don't drag in things you're not using.

[Bomberofdoom]

Hang on, were you able to send it to your friends?

[EricVanWyk]

Wow! Now I remember why I gave up on Win32 so long ago. I was in pretty much you exact position 5 years ago. After running into so many "gotchas" (I had a different word for them), I decided to cut my losses. I switched to Python and haven't looked back.

I won't start a holy war thread here, but you may want to carefully consider exactly what you want to do, and then compare your available language options before committing.

I would also like to highly recommend "How to Think Like a Computer Scientist" by Allen Downey. You can download it for free at http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/
Allen Downey is a prof at Olin College (my alma mater). Several years ago he wrote a Java version of the book and copy-lefted it. Someone took the book, revised it for Python, and rereleased it. Allen then read this book and learned Python.

... Yes, he learned Python by reading his own book!

It has some chapters that deal with a little bit of user interfacing, so it shouldn't be hard at all to get going.

Good luck!
Eric

[wt200999]

Not to be a killjoy but I know someone who uses python and his application is fairly slow, for the simplest of programs you have to package the exe with tons of files, it just seems like a hassle. If you are going to learn a different language to do it C# is the way to go. C# is the most similar to C++ as well