C++ Windows Programming?

Technical Programming
21

You need to look into LGPL further. You do NOT have to pay for licensing if you want to sell a program later!

I will put in a huge word for Qt here. I’ve been using it for the last 5-6 years at work for cross platform development. Previous to this, I had used Microsoft MFC and also some other cross platform libraries. Qt is by far the best thought out and most comprehensive solution, and it’s now free. I’ve convinced a few people to spend a weekend with Qt and a ‘programming with Qt’ book, and they’ve all been able to get started quickly. Certainly much faster than with straight windows calls or MFC. It was written by programmers for programmers and it shows in the logical design. The extras, such as networking, xml, database, and so on are just great extras.

Steve

22

Wow! Thanks Steve! I didn’t know the difference between GPL and LGPL before your post prompted me to check. I had no idea Qt was available for commercial apps, for free.

Time to check out Qt :slight_smile:

Do you have any specific books you would like to recommend?

23

Andy, I was in almost the same place you were around this time last year. I was learning C++ and wanted to move on to some GUI programming.

For basic C++ turtorials, www.learncpp.com worked as an awesome tool for me.

As for Windows API and GUI work, this tutorial got me off the ground:

http://www.winprog.org/tutorial/

Visual Studio is an awesome IDE in my opinion, regardless if you’re just doing console work or doing GUI stuff. It also has MSDN help built directly into it, which is extremely useful while doing Windows API work. You can the express version for free at http://www.microsoft.com/express/download/

Best of luck.