How do I create a GUI for a windows application us

Question

I am deciding on how to develop a GUI for a small c++/win32 api project (working Visual Studio C++ 2008). The project will only need a few components to start off the main process so it will be very light weight (just 1 button and a text box pretty much...). My question is this:

I don't have experience developing GUIs on windows but I can learn easily. So, what should I use? A Visual editor (drag and drop code generationg: my preference for desktop GUI designing by far (java/swing)). Or should I use a speicific library? Either way, WHICH library or visual editor should I use? I heard someone mention writing the GUI in C#, then calling the C++ code... the thing is, that this is such a simple GUI I would find it easier to just keep it all in C++, but I'm open to whatever the best suggestion is.

Answer 1

If you want to learn about win32, WTL http://wtl.sourceforge.net/ is the pretty lightweight equivalent to MFC, but you have to love template to use it.

If you want something simple MFC is already integrated with VS, also it has a large base of extra code and workarounds of know bugs in the net already.

Also Qt is really great framework it have a nice set of tools, dialog editor, themes, and a lot of other stuff, plus your application will be ready to be cross platform, although it will require some time to get accustomed.

You also have Gtk, wxWindow, and you will have no problems if you have already used it on linux.

Answer 2

I have used wxWidgets for small project and I loved it. Qt is another good choice but for commercial use you would probably need to buy a licence. If you write in C++ don't use Win32 API as you will end up making it object oriented. This is not easy and time consuming. Also Win32 API has too many macros and feels over complicated for what it offers.

Answer 3

by far the best C++ GUI library out there is Qt, it's comprehensive, easy to learn, really fast, and multiplattform.

ah, it recently got a LGPL license, so now you can download it for free and include on commercial programs

Answer 4

Avoid QT (for noobs) or any useless libraries (absurd for a such basic thing)

Just use the VS Win32 api Wizard, ad the button and text box...and that's all !

In 25 seconds !

Answer 5

If you're doing a very simple GUI and you're already using Visual Studio then it may make sense to just go with MFC. You can just use the Visual Studio MFC wizard to create a dialog based application, drop two controls on it and away you go.

MFC is dated and has its fair share of annoyances, but it will certainly do the job for you if you're just talking about a button and a text box.

I don't have any experience with Qt, so I can't compare the two.

Answer 6

I strongly advise against using plain Win32 because it's pretty hard to make it work OK in all situations, it's pretty dull and tedious work and the Common Controls library isn't that complete. Also, most of the work has been done for you.

Every time I end up doing plain Win32 I have to spent at least a couple of hours on the most trivial tasks because I have to look up all the parameters, flags, functions, macros and figure out how to hook them up properly. I'd generally prefer a simple drag-and-drop don't-make-me-use-my-brains type of solution and just slam the thing together in 2 minutes.

As a lightweight toolkit I'd suggest omgui which has a clean and pretty API. It doesn't, however, come with any tools.

If you need tool support, you'll probably end up wanting to go for either MFC (resource editor built into Visual Studio) or Qt. I don't know if wxWidgets has any tools, but I presume it has.

Edit: David Citron mentions that apparently the resource editor in Visual Studio generates Win32 compatible resource files, so that's probably the preferred way to do things if you wanted to keep things simple.