Advice for C++ GUI programming

Question

I have been writing C++ Console/CMD-line applications for about a year now and would like to get into windows GUI apps. For those of you who have taken this road before, what advice/tips can you give me. Ex: good readings, tutorials, approach tactics, etc...

I know this is a really broad question, but i really don't know how/where to start, thus not knowing how to ask this question properly.

Answer 1

I highly recommend the use of the Qt Libraries for several reasons:

1. The Framework is freely available for Windows, Linux, MacOS X, and a couple of mobile systems. Since version 4.5 the license is LGPL, which basically means that you can use Qt even in commercial applications.
2. The design of Qt is out-standing, e.g. they use modern design patterns and a very consistent interface design (I don't know many other libraries that use object-oriented ideas in such perfection). Using Qt is the same as using Boost: it will improve your own programming skills, because they use such beautiful concepts!
3. They are bloody fast, for instance in rendering (due to the different back-end for OpenGL, DirectX, etc.). Just have a look on this video and you see what can easily be done with Qt but is hard to achieve with native Windows, Mac, or Linux programming.
4. They have a really great documentation, with tons of tutorials and a very good reference. You can start learning Qt easily with the given docs! The documentation is also available online, so have a look and see by yourself.
5. As mentioned before, Qt is cross-platform; you have one source-base that works on all the important operating systems. Why will you limit yourself to Windows, when you can also have Mac and Linux "for free"?
6. Qt is so much more than "just" the user interface; they also offer network and database functionality, OpenGL bindings, a full-working web-browser control (based on WebKit), a multimedia playback library, and much much much more.

Honestly, I wasted a couple of years by developing software natively for Windows, while I could have been so much more productive.

Answer 2

For C++ you have two choices, Native or Managed.

For native development, my team (at Microsoft, in Windows) uses the Windows Template Library. It works very well for us.

You should learn the basics of Win32 and how Windowing works. The canonical tome is Programming Windows®

For Managed development you can use C++ with Windows Forms. However, windows forms has been supplanted by Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

• Here is a good site that can get you up to speed.
• This tutorial is useful
• You can use Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition for your tools (they are free).