Application GUI development platform

Question

Coming from C++ & MFC background, is there any better (maintainability/customization) platform in developing application GUI ?

We are developing industrial applications (machine vision), where :
-Performance-critical (mostly image processing in CPU atm, but GPU is up next)
-Low level hardware interfacing (inhouse PCI device, frame grabber, motion card)
-Real-time data visualization (images / statistical graph)
-Future roadmap includes networkability for distributed processing and remote access.

Cross-platform will not be important for us since the system runs in controlled-environment (customer only cares whether the system runs and they got their output).

There are also concerns on migration cost (3rd party dependencies, training cost for developers and service personnel)

Edit
Clarification on the "image processing" mentioned above:
I'm referring to "picture" (2D information in matrix format) rather than graphic (commonly 3D vectorized). Currently we uses 3rd party imaging library (for spatial domain processing like segmentation, OCR/OCV, morphology, pattern match) and incorporate our result logic.

Answer 1

If you need performance-critical graphics processing, then C++/DirectX or C++/OpenGL are your best bets, hands down. C++/DirectX is arguably the more maintainable of the two.

That said... depending on the actual processing you're doing, you might consider moving portions of your UI to a more maintainable platform. The .NET framework / WPF can do some pretty amazing things, and with good implementation of patterns like MVVM and can be amazingly maintainable. Ditto the networking side; WCF abstracts a lot of common protocols away from the code, making for cleaner, more maintainable networking code. You can even write your translation layer between your unmanaged processing and your managed layer in C++/CLI.

That said, it's all very subjective. I can't tell enough from your bullet points to make a good judgement on whether or not you can offload some or even all of your processing to .NET/C#. It's worth considering, but my gut tells me that it's probably not your best bet.