CODEWITHSUNDEEP
windowsvisual-studio-2010mfc
gordonwd
gordonwd

Reputation: 4587

Options for Development of Win32/MFC Applications

I'm still using Visual C++ 2003 to maintain and enhance a PC-based program. It is written in C & C++ and just runs on the PC -- not on the web, a phone, in the cloud, or whatever -- and I have no idea what this .NET framework is all about and probably don't need to care at this time.

Anyway, now that I've upgraded my development PC to Windows 7 it's getting more inconvenient to run the old development environments. I think that the latest full version of Visual Studio 2010 would still work to build my project, but the cost is really off-putting. At least in 2003 they offered Visual C++ by itself for around $100, but the freebie Visual C++ .NET 2010 would do me no good at all.

So are there any alternatives to Visual Studio Pro out there these days? I'd even be willing to rewrite the stuff that actually depends on MFC if I can find something to replace it (and still have access to all the Win32 and early C library support).

Upvotes: 2

Views: 331

Answers (5)

Mark Ransom
Mark Ransom

Reputation: 308111

I think the free version of Visual Studio Express can still compile plain old C++ without the .NET. The only problems are that it doesn't include MFC or a resource editor. You might be able to use the MFC include files and libraries from your Visual Studio 2003, but I don't know what you would do for resource editing.

wxWidgets is similar enough to MFC that you might pick it up very quickly. The biggest difference is how you lay out dialogs.

Upvotes: 0

mrsheen
mrsheen

Reputation: 892

Why not pick up a second hand copy of Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 on e-bay?

PS: I always considered VS2003 a really bad IDE when compared to VS2005 and VS2008.

Upvotes: 3

yasouser
yasouser

Reputation: 5177

If you are willing to rewrite the stuff that depends on MFC, then you have many options, but I will suggest these two:

Gtk+ - if you want to develop everything using C. If you like c++ then you have c++ bindings gtkmm

Qt - this is a c++ framework which comes with complete development tools too.

Upvotes: 0

dwo
dwo

Reputation: 3636

You could use Visual Studio 2010 Express if you would replace all MFC-stuff with pure Win32-calls or with another windowing library like Qt, Fox, eGUI, Tk ...

How much GUI is your application? If it's mostly a algorithms and data classes, rewriting the GUI in C++ might make sense. If it's mostly dialogs and lists, rewriting it on the .net-platform would be much faster.

Upvotes: 0

karlphillip
karlphillip

Reputation: 93410

Code::Blocks

Eclipse

Dev-C++

Upvotes: 0

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