C++ Windows Programming?

[KevinRo]

Originally Posted by basicxman

Oh. P.S. Yes I've used microsoft's visual express stuff, didn't like it much and I would like to learn something used in the real industry, more powerful, and that doesn't give you all the hard code for you XD

You will find that Visual Studio is, by a pretty large margin, the most used compiler in industry. Most everything you will use in Visual Express will be applicable to Visual Studio. So, if you want industry, you want to start with Visual Express.

There are other free tools out there as were listed in the other replies. A few are pretty good. Most are, well, written to be free and not as feature rich or as reliable as the Microsoft offering.

If you want to learn the programming language, I highly recommend writing a Win32 console applications for a while. The GUI stuff on any platform may distract you from learning the basics of the language. Everything you learn about the C++ language in a console application will be 100% applicable when you get ready to write a GUI application.

Kevin