C++ UI resources

Question

Now that I know C++ I want to get into desktop application that have a UI instead of Command Prompt stuff, where should I start?, and what are some good online resources?

Answer 1

Get Visual Studio Express, and start with a MFC "Dialog Based" application. All the window toolkits mentioned are good, but MFC will look the best on a resume!

Answer 2

If you are using Windows the traditional place to start is Petzold

There is a nice simple framework here which will help you on the way without abstracting too much away.

Answer 3

It might lack some features, but FLTK is an incredibly simple cross-platform GUI library.

Answer 4

If cross platform support is important then I would second the suggestion to look at Qt. It supports Windows, Linux and the Mac. For free software it is free (there is a GPL version on Unix but not for Windows) but for comercial software it is not particulary cheap. There are now several books on Programming with Qt.

It does come with a large number of extra libraries for networking, parsing XML etc. It also has integration with Visual Studio on Windows.

One downside with Qt is that there are not as many add on libraries as with some other GUI frameworks. Ot will depend on the type of applications that you wish to write whether this is important to you or not.

Answer 5

The Fox GUI Toolkit

Really decent tried-and-true toolkit with a very nice event system. I've used the Ruby port, and my Windows apps had a very native look and feel.

Answer 6

If marketability is a concern, then C++/CLI with WinForms and WPF which really translates to "just learn WinForms and WPF, regardless of what specific language you use".

CodeProject has a ton of WinForms/WPF samples/tutorials to get you started.

Answer 7

How about QT? Its cross-platform and its is used in a lot of commercial softwares.

Answer 8

On Linux and maybe Windows, you can use Gtk+ with Glade. Gtk+ is the GUI toolkit. Glade is a GUI drag and drop GUI editor. If you came from Windows or Java and thought GUI programming is hard, this stuff is easy.

Answer 9

wxWidgets is a cross platform GUI library for C++ (and other languages). The main site should have enough pointers to resources to get going.

You might also want to check out this question/answer here on stack overflow if you are specifically thinking of Windows

Answer 10

I use Codegear's C++ Builder. It's C++ language support is not 100% but it more than makes up for it by having a great two-way RAD IDE and the ability to use a huge library of existing Delphi components.