GUI Development With C++ In A Windows Environment [closed]

Question

First off, please understand. I searched this and messed with it for weeks. I have finally given up a solo endeavor and decided to ask this lovely community to help.

I wanted to write GUI applications for windows. Reason being I wanted to port my favorite command line applications to have an interface. I though 'Hey this shouldn't be this hard'.

So I Googled for a couple hours and got a good idea of what I needed. I downloaded Qt and installed everything. Next I found a tutorial aimed at using my current IDE (Bloodshed Dev C++) to work with Qt. Everything went to shambles after that.

I am quite confused what to do now. Some people say my IDE is old and I need to change. Some say I have to configure Windows differently. Someone suggested using Visual Studio C++ (or whatever the Microsoft IDE is).

Here is your where I need your advice and help. What should I do/install/upgrade?

Answer 1

As of version 4.5 Qt now comes packaged with the official, cross platform Qt IDE QtCreator. Just download and install Qt 4.5 and you get a full featured (libs, IDE, forms designer, resource editor) development environment for free.

http://www.qtsoftware.com/downloads

Answer 2

Okay, there are two pieces to this.

The first one is that under Windows, you're going to need a Windows GUI library. You can write to the Windows API in several ways, but the simplest is to use Microsoft's own. That means picking up Visual Studio in some incarnation.

QT, Wx, and otehrs are all utility libraries built on top of the basic Windows API. They're good for portability to other platforms, but they necessarily add some complexity.

For C++, you need a compiler. Again, for Windows, the simplest thing is to use Visual Studio, but there are other compilers available. The most common free one is going to be the GNU compilers. The easy way to get those is with Cygwin, but that is a UNIX-like environment.

I think the conclusion is that for a beginner, you're best off with Visual Studio.

Once you get it, there are many tutorial around on the web and at Microsoft to learn to use it.