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There are now so many ways to write windows apps, win32, MFC, ATL, .NET, WinForms, and probably some others that I don't know of. Which one should I choose? I'd like one that works on a fresh install of Vista, and is modern and easy to use.
I highly recommend Qt. It's cross-platform, very easy to use and LGPL licensed.
If you are amateur with C++ you'll have much easier time learning WinForms than any of the native Visual C++ frameworks (Win32, MVC, etc.). WPF will give you best versatily. It's a bit harder to master than WinForms but managed and so keeps you away from the nasty Win32 stuff.
The native frameworks are good mainly if you want to crunch the last bits of performance or need to keep the footprint small for stuff such as shell extensions.
I'd recommend checking WinForms at least first to get some quick understanding of the principles. If WinForms doesn't suit you, you can then move to either C++ if you feel you need more low level control or WPF if you wish more shiny features like skinning and theming.
Edit:
Though if you have a look at WPF, remember that fresh Vista contains only .Net 3.0 so 3.5 and 3.5 SP1 features require a separate runtime installation.
actuallly it's very easy to start with Qt - you get a complete SDK incl. a very nice IDE as a simple package and a smart integration into VisualStudio.
Plus the LGPL licensing which allows anybody to write opensource and closed source/commercial apps without paying any fees - the commercial support/licenses are optionally!
The biggest advantage of Qt is the very easy to learn and very very clean C++ API, which can do more than just building GUI apps (it supports low leven networking and file io etc.).
Best regards,
Chris
Short answer... It depends.
Whats your skillset/background? Why are you developing a desktop app? Is it for work or as an experiment for you to learn something new? Will there be multiple other developers working on it and whats they're skillset?
My personal preference would be winforms because that's what I spend most time coding in (in C#). They're very quick to put together and the VS IDE is very quick & stable for building the UI elements of your application. And you can publish/deploy them using Click Once which allows easy updating of the clients when you make changes & updates.
Alternatively, you might want to look at WPF which is the new Presentation Foundation in .NET 3.5. This will allow you to leverage a newer "shinier" UI experience for desktop applications.
Straight up Win32 is getting better with the Scenic Ribbon. Will work on Vista and Windows 7.
I'm probably biased (aren't we all?), but since your question states you're interested in Windows development and you want a modern and easy to use GUI framework that's works with Vista out of the box, the obvious answer is .NET WinForms.
I personally prefer gtkmm. Although it doesn't look as good as Qt or the native frameworks on Windows, I think the API is the most transparent among all frameworks I tried. It feels very OOish, and is very easy to learn. You can easily create GUI layouts with Glade, but you can also create decent designs with nothing but code. In this regard, gtkmm is similar to Java GUI programming.
I would recommend WxWidgets. The API is easy to understand; it is very well documented with samples; and it is cross-platform. If you are programming an application that is going to have any a large number of users, you will eventually want to have the option of running it on a different operating system. By choosing a Microsoft only API you will permanently put yourself into the Microsoft corner. Getting out will require a serious refactoring of your software which will require that you learn yet another API. Take my advice and start with a cross-platform API - it will save you a lot of grief in the future.
I would recommend C++Builder 2009, which can create applications that work with Windows 2000, XP and Vista.
If you go the Microsoft route, be sure to check which frameworks they are putting the most muscle behind lately. For instance, MFC is an older framework that should NOT be used for new development because MS isn't putting any time into it, and the marketplace for add-on MFC components has dried up and blown away.
Basically, when choosing MS backed technology, make sure you pick one that isn't already on the outs.
So you're a student with only PHP knowledge? Well before even considering a GUI you'll need to come up to speed in a proper language. I would suggest C# as you are already used to curly braces and you want to program Windows. WinForms is part of .Net, not a separate thing. Just download Visual Studio 2008 Express and you're up and running. By the way, GUI programming can be hard in any language, especially after you move past the stage of toy programs to real apps.
If you knew C++ to a higher degree I would have suggested Qt. Simply because the new LGPL licensing removes the final impediment. It's also cross-platform, high quality, high performance and now has the financial backing of a huge company (Nokia) to ensure further development.
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I started C++ programming not long before and I want to learn GUI programming in C++. I looked at windows programming and the syntax looks really difficult. So my question is, should I use windows api at all? If so, what are the advantages of windows api over a toolkit like Qt or Direct2D?
It somewhat depends what sort of application you are trying to build. Most frameworks provide a level of abstraction over the Windows API but do so at the cost of flexibility. You should try and pick a framework that's designed to build the sort of application that you are trying to build.
For building Windows client applications then the Windows API (I assume you mean the Win32 API) will do the job but is very low level. The advantage is it gives you a great deal of control and also forces you to learn how a Windows application really works. For a lot of people these aren't always positives.
If you are trying to create a more graphically rich application then Direct2D gives you this but also means that you have to learn COM and some would say this API is also quite complex.
If you are just learning C++ and want to build simple graphical applications then I would recommend checking out Cinder. It's perfectly possible to build simple graphically rich applications and games in a few hundred lines of C++. Here's an example of the Conway's Game of Life written in a couple of hundred lines.
Qt is also an option but I've not used it. Again it depends on you goal. For example one of Qt's features is cross platform portability, which may, or may not be important if you are just starting out with C++.
If you are just creating some projects for your own learning, then I would suggest that you create some GUI using Windows API without any framework. This will help you learn the internals on how things work (messaging, etc).
But to make any real world project you must choose existing framework (MFC, Qt etc) so that you can save a lot of time. You will understand the framework better if you create some GUI projects with plain Windows API SDK.
If you platform is only Windows, then you can in fact develop faster using .Net Framework. Of course there is also Xamarin that will allow you to write in C# for cross platform.
So what you choose depends on your goals.
With WinAPI you can use all Windows GUI features, controls, styles, respond to some rarely used messages etc.
It's easier to achieve native Windows look&feel.
Higher-lever GUI libraries, especially multiplatform ones, are usually "least common denominator", limited in many ways, with some controls (e.g. dialogs) reinvented just for the sake of it. You can patch your code with WinAPI calls, but that quickly turns into spaghetti.
For one, tools like Qt, OGRE, OSG, OpenGL etc are cross-platform. So you won't be stuck with using your program only on Windows.
If by windows API you meant VC++ with WM_PAINT etc, then it's worth learning it only for the sake of knowledge about how Windows works. The parts about dirty rectangles etc will intrigue you.
"I started C++ programming not long before.." - so I would advise to start with well-documented library such as QT. You'll have much to learn in C++ itself and to learn WinAPI at the same time will be twice (or more) difficult.
The answer in general depends on the requirements, and if you want to learn "GUI programming in C++" I'd say it means QT (or some other library/framework). I do not know any rich GUI projects now which are written on pure WinAPI (what for?). (If smb knows, please put a link here.)
But you can ask yourself another question - you want to learn C++ or GUI programming? :)
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I am a big fan of Microsoft Technologies. Learned lot of .NET Framework and C# like programming languages. But I believe .NET applications are running on top of .NET Framework so They have some kind of slow. Then I heard about MFC a wrapper classes for Windows Development and It is standard for Commercial Application Development(I mean not business level application) so I want to know is it worth to learn MFC now? Is there any alternatives? I want to develop commercial level application Thanks for read my question.
No, I wouldn't learn it - I'd look into it to gain an insight into some of the ways the GUI classes work so you have a wider understanding of this old, but important, technology. But I would not learn it as a technology you want to create new GUIs into the future. Forget the non-GUI parts of MFC, only people who are big fans of Microsoft technologies used them, everyone else used much better libraries...
Although you can write great applications using it, TortoiseSVN for example, today using Winforms is much easier and gives you the same results. Yes, .net is slower than native code but for a GUI you're generally limited by the speed a human can react to changes, so a 'slow' system is still going to be ok, unless it gets so slow it is noticeably laggy or slow to respond. For this reason I'd skip WPF as I know too many support calls from myself and friends who all have complained about WPF's performance (there's also lots on the web about WPF being pretty poor).
there are alternatives, Qt is a great GUI tool. wxWidgets is good to, and also cross platform. Today the general attitude to GUIs are that they should be web-based, so you might be better advised to learn ASP.NET MVC 4 (not the older versions) as there appears to be a significant number of jobs for this technology today (tomorrow might be different!)
There's still shops who have a MFC codebase who cant just throw it away since its well tested projects and for those it can be useful but as a learning exercise it would be better to learn straight Win32 programming from which MFC and .NET still is derived.
From my experience:
Guerilla games the makers of the PS3 Killzone series have tools in MFC
Bosch security systems where I worked still use MFC
Philips medical still has.
For new development they all use different technologies though.
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First, I know this is kind of common question, but I could not find the exact answer I am looking for.
I have done many projects in Java using Swing. Starting by just coding the GUI, then later moving onto GUI designers. This proved to be a very quick and easy way to build GUI apps.
But now, I need to move to C++. I am beginning a project which uses a lot of HW resources (DirectX, OpenCV, etc...) I know there are Java libraries for these technologies. However, C++ is definitely the right way to go, considering the internals of this project.
I know C and C++ languages well from MCU programming. Also, I have read many articles on native WinAPI programming, Windows internals, etc. I think I have enough knowledge to start. I don´t want to worry much about GUI design, but it must look appropriate.
I know there are few basic options: Pure WinAPI, MFC, WTL, Qt... I would be very glad if there were some kind of GUI designer tool, but from my research, there is not. There is the MFC wizard which helps to create a basic window, but it is not a designer. The closest thing I found was Qt. But from what I read, it is not using WinAPI for drawing, for in future look and feel of Qt written app can differ from native Windows look.
So, to summarize, please, if you are experienced with creating native Windows C++ Apps with GUI, what would you recommend to me? Specifically, is there any tool or designer I missed?
(I am using Visual Studio 2010 professional, since I have it free thanks to the DreamSpark project)
I recently used Qt4 and was very pleased with the API. I found it straightforward, well documented, and the code is extremely concise.
Qt does an extremely good job of emulating the target OS look and feel (as #In silico pointed out in the comments, Qt actually draws everything itself and does not use native components) Regardless, this can be coded by hand or visually through the GUI editor in their IDE, Qt Creator. If you go this route, I recommend creating your initial GUI project (.pro file) there, then importing it into Visual Studio via the Qt Visual Studio Add-In.
Slots and signals, Qt's event/messaging system, is also worth mentioning. Yes, it's critical to GUI programming, but could also be extremely useful in lower-level code.
I expect Qt would work well in your project, but as always, create a few simple tests to ensure the technologies will work together feasibly.
Here are a few hints:
Don't lock yourself into C++. C# and Java (for instance) can be easily interop'ed with C/C++. (Through PInvoke or C++/CLI for the former and JNI for the later). C++ may not be the ideal language to write a GUI quickly.
Your requirement for "native windows look" is arbitrary and you should think it over. Is that really what you need ?
Winforms. It's an older technology but is still widely used. You use the API from C++/CLI or C# (or any .NET) language.
WPF, a more recent API but that will be harder to deal with from C++, (better with C# or VB)
One of the many GUI toolkit available on the market that have a C or C++ API (QT, GTK, wxWidgets, the VCL, ... list here). Some have "native" looks, some don't. Some have designers some don't. Some are free, some aren't.
If you need simple user interface i recommend use WTL - is simple, lightweight, header-only library, very good wrapper over WinAPI. In Visual Studio you can use form designer for creating windows and use WTL classes for implement interaction with user. WTL have poor documentation but WTL is looking like MFC.
If you want rich possibilities i recommend use Qt. It's very powerful GUI framework with great community.
You can use the C++Builder XE2 (Part of the Rad Studio IDE), which includes the VCL (Visual Component Library), the VCL is a wrapper over the Windows controls (and also includes custom controls) which increase the development productivity.
The wxWidgets c++ class library comes with a screen builder.
VCL is a good way to go. It has a GUI designer tool (Embarcadero Rad Studio XE6) fully native gui developer for C++ and Delphi
Depending on how strict your definition is, you could use .NET Windows Forms or Windows Presentation Foundation and plug logic in from C++, C++/CLI, and C#. That would not be a pure C++ solution. In fact, I wouldn't even necessarily advise using C++ in that situation. Simply using C# would be more intuitive and maintainable. WinForms and WPF have pretty awesome GUI designers though.
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.
I highly recommend the use of the Qt Libraries for several reasons:
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.
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!
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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).
My best advice for Windows C++ GUI programming is don't do Windows C++ GUI programming.
I realize that is an extremely uninformative/smartass response if it's not qualified, so I'll note that you don't state that you need to do C++ Windows GUI programming, but that you "Would like to get into Windows GUI apps." If that is the case, and you don't have a very specific reason to use C++ (i.e. gigantic existing legacy codebase written in MFC or a bunch of C++ code that you want to build a front-end for but would be a pain to expose to .NET code), then it is going to be a lot easier and more productive to go the .NET route and start learning Windows Forms or better yet WPF using C# or another .NET language of your choice.
If you do need to go C++, then I would second the recommendations for 3rd party toolkits like Qt or wxWidgets, as the state of C/C++ GUI programming tools from Microsoft is now abysmal.
Most windowing libraries and technologies use similar idioms. Pick one and learn it.
The Windows Template Library is a very nice veneer for Microsoft Windows while sticking with C++.
For cross platform C++ windowing toolkits (they work on Microsoft Windows as well as other platforms) you can try QT or wxWidgets.
Well, for the Windows GUI, get used to referencing the MSDN a lot, assuming you want to deal with the API directly.
My favorite resource for learning the basics was theForger's tutorial, but there are hundreds of books and other sites out there.
I guess an important place to start is your toolkit. You tagged this visualc++, so I assume you are looking at that, however remember there are other toolkits like Qt.
I would suggest starting at Microsoft's tutorials.
+1 for Qt. I would put documentation at the top of my list of requirements for a GUI system. Qt has great docs and there's a huge community behind it. Also there are several books about it. Good docs are extremely important if you are working alone with no other team members to rely on. Alternatives are wxWidgets, MFC, WTL, FLTK and many more. They all have pros and cons. Eg FLTK is small and only provides GUI whereas Qt and wxWidgets also include networking, database access etc. Qt seems to have the most momentum at the moment after the Nokia buyout eg the release of Qt Creator which enables you to develop apps outside of Visual Studio.
It has been so long since I worked with C++ on Windows GUI, my word is always avoid C++ in Windows GUI unless you have a very good reason, I mean a good darn reason, if you need some performance C# is more than enough for 90% of the cases, and if you need more power write your performance critical thing in a C++ dll, and call it from a Windows Forms or WPF application.
It will save you hell of a lot time.
Still my opinion, if you have another I totally respect that
The first question is that do you want to develop Free, Open Source, for personal use or Commercial applications in C++?
If you want to develop for personal use! Then you can go with some good C++ Toolkit, Framework or API.
If you want to develop an GUI application that will be open source or free. Then you can go with C++ Toolkits, Frameworks or API's that have the GPL or any open source license that fits your needs.
Even you can develop Commercial applications with open source toolkits, frameworks or API's that have LGPL license.
The second question is that do you want to develop for the Windows, Mac, Unix or Linux? or these all, even for the mobile platform?
If you have a Windows user, as I am, and want to develop only for the Windows, I mean not for the cross platform, you can go with Win32 API, although, learning Win32 API is harder but it gives you the complete control over the machine. Believe me that no other tool would you provide the complete control over the machine. If you dislike Win32 API, for any reason, you can go with MFC, which is another technology from Microsoft, but is not free, old and has less attention now a days. If you decide to develop with .NET platform, you have C++/CLI, an extension to C++ language for developing .NET applications. .NET gives you the type safety, OOP and a built in garbage collector, provides you the all API's related to Windows and x86 or x64 machine in one package.
.NET has its own world! Microsoft has decided to port .NET to other operating systems too, Mono project is an example... You can develop nearly all kinds of applications using .NET.
If you want to develop C++ GUI applications for the cross platform, then Qt, WxWidgets and U++ are available for your help. You can write once and deploy anywhere with these libraries. Many open source IDE's and compliers are also available to develop C++ applications with ease. Note that if you do not want to develop for the cross platform, any cross platform library would be overhead and unavoidable increase in size of the executables.
Is your C++ knowledge is good enough to program software systems?
In fact, if your knowledge of C++ is not enough deep and you do not understand programming methods like OOP, Encupsolation, Classes, Interfaces, Types, Programming Patterns and so on, you can not use any toolkit with full potencial.
Do not forget that every Toolkit, Framework or API is implemented in some programming language. If you do understand the language very well, you can use the toolkit very well. I think, you would understand my point.
Put aside WPF or VC++ or Qt, You can also try out several libraries such as :
OpenFrameworks
Processing
...
there's an active project for developing Gui with Openframeworks here:
http://www.syedrezaali.com/blog/?p=2172
Are you familiar with Microsoft Visual Studio and .NET technologies? Since you want to develop for Windows platforms why don't you start by taking a look at Microsoft Visual C++ Express Edition.? Explore a little with the available tools from MS and search for some tutorials.
We are in 2020 but the question is still pertinent. I agree with Qt users, it's a great framework.
However, there is also C++Builder that offers you design GUI visually at design-time. C++Builder application can be built on both VCL (Windows only) and FireMonkey (cross-platorm) frameworks. Clang compiler can produce both 32 and 64-bits native executables. Community edition of C++Builder is free. Delphi integration is seamless: C++Builder project can include Delphi files directly and use any existing Delphi component packages and libraries.
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I am writing a fairly large and complex data analysis program and I have reached the point where I think it is about time to build a GUI for the program. So my question is:
Which GUI toolkit should I use?
I am completely new to coding and building GUIs and would appreciate any guidance that can be offered. It doesn't have to be the simplest tool kit in the world, I learn rather fast. However, it does need to be able to do the following things (some if not all of these are probably incredibly basic for any given toolkit but I thought that it would be good to throw all this out there just in case).
It has to allow me to draw directly to the screen so that I can put graphs (spectra really), plots and things like them up for the user to see. I need to be able to collect position information on where they clicked on aforementioned spectra. I need to be able to display text and take text input from the user. It needs to be able to generate menus (you know File, Edit, etc). If it were to have some built in widget for generating tables that would be handy (though I can surmount a lack of that if I can draw directly to the screen). It needs to be able to pop up warnings, dialogue boxes, save and open boxes, etc. That is pretty much it, most of these seem pretty basic when I write them out but I don't want to get the GUI partly coded and then realize that I I need to rewrite it with a different toolkit.
It should be noted that I have written this program in C++ and that I don't want to have to write the GUI part in C or something else so the toolkit needs to support C++.
Additionally a cross platform toolkit would be preferable over a single platform toolkit. However if it must be a single platform toolkit then I would prefer it be for Linux.
Finally, I would DRAMATICALLY prefer an open source toolkit to a closed source toolkit.
Beyond that I cannot think of anything to add. Thank you in advance for your time and answers.
Hmmm based on the answers I shall look at both Qt and wxWidgets and see which appeals to me more. I with I could accept multiple answers as accepted but I can't, and since I am looking at two things it would be unfair to only accept one of the answers, perhaps in a week or two then I have looked at the toolkits and figured out which I want to use.
For C++, in my opinion, Qt is the least frustrating and most fully featured toolkit. Its also fully cross platform. Note that Qt will be LGPL licensed some time in March 2009, when version 4.5 becomes available. Currently, its only offered in a GPL and commercial license version.
Qt's GUI designer is good. It has lots of utility functions (scene graph library, translation support, built-in Javascript engine, built-in WebKit library). Via the MOC (a special pre-compiler) it also brings a few run-time binding capabilities and introspection to C++.
For your technical application, you might find that Qwt (http://qwt.sourceforge.net/) provides what you need. It is built upon Qt.
Qt can even be used "headless" if you want its utility support (such as networking, etc) without a GUI.
The other cross platform C++ option is wxWidgets, which is usable but not really comparable to Qt. Its a much lower level toolkit, and isn't as easy to use or fully rounded. Gtkmm is another option, in the spirit of GTK+.
Try WxWidgets. Cross platform (compile on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows) and widely accepted.
http://www.wxwidgets.org/
Open Source too!
I see nobody commented on GTKmm. It is the C++ incarnation of GTK+, and it is a real pleasure to use. I have also used Qt, but I don't like the messy signal/connect code, the moc_XXX generated files, etc. GTKmm has signals and such, but not that preprocessing step, as well as almost all of the Qt toolkit can offer in the graphics arena.
I'd say it depends on whether or not you want the native Look and Feel of the OSes you're targeting for your application. Qt, like said earlier, is probably the easiest of the cross platform toolkits to use, however it is its own widget set. You don't get a native app look & feel unless you happen to be running on KDE.
I use wxWidgets at work. It can be frustrating at times and in some places not very polished, but it does give the native look and feel for the platforms you're targeting. It actually wraps the native UI controls to give them a common API on all platforms that wxWidgets is ported to.
I had the same question and searched for good GUI toolkits.
At the end I found out, that a GUI toolkit isn't enough - I need a complete platform independent solution providing me the build environment, IDE integration and lower level functions like network sockets and file I/O.
My result? Since nearly 9 years I use Qt (but the first years only for GUI stuff) - now I have highly complex networking apps with load balancing, massive multithreading and image processing.
You can use Qt as commercial user with professional support (like me) or just start your own projects under GPL and with 4.5 with LGPL (which allows commercial use).
The other alternatives like wxWidgets and GTK++ are very good choices for GUI programming.
But if you want a well documented and complete solution, then Qt is your choice.
Best Regards,
3DH
I'd also recommend wxWidgets together with DialogBlocks, which is a really nice visual GUI builder.
I will say that wxWidgets has a few rough edges, but the development community is very active and extremely responsive to bug reports / questions / contributions.
I use wxWidgets(toolkit) + wxFormBuilder(gui-designer) + eclipse(ide).
All tools are cross-platform and free.
Qt. Also you can use KDE which is built on top of Qt.