Getting started with unmanaged Windows application?

Question

The app I am thinking about is something like an email reader (UI intensive). Is MFC the best/only way to go? Are there any other development environments for this other than Visual Studio? Are there any recommended/must read for this?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

With C++ you can use:

1. Netbeans
2. Vi/Emacs etc + command line/gcc/ms compiler's etc
3. Eclipse
4. C++ Builder
5. CodeWarrior

For UI components there are many options:

1. FLTK
2. QT
3. Wx

Answer 2

First, which programming language are you thinking off ? If your going down the C/C++ road, then you can either write win32 gdi code, use MFC, WTL or a variety of UI toolkits.

Visual studio provides a very powerful C++ compiler. If your looking for an alternative, intel C++ compilers produces very fast and tight exe's.

There are so many choices. I reckon you need to gather your specifications before you can decide how to proceed.

Answer 3

For native Windows development, it's difficult to beat Delphi, whether it's for network, database, multi-tier or (especially) UI intensive applications. The latest version includes specific support for Windows 7, including gestures.

Take a look at the Reviewer's Guide for more details.

Answer 4

I am really unsure how to answer this question.

On the one hand, Writing a GUI Windows app using the Win32 API is actually not that hard. Each GUI development environment has a learning curve, and once a certain level of triviality is exceeded, they are all as equally easy, or hard, to master.

MFC is very little more than a C++ wrapper around the basic windows concepts. The windows API for example has a HWND - handle to a window, that you can pass to functions like ShowWindow().

MFC has a CWnd that encapsulates an HWND, and has methods, such as Show(). The problem with MFC's wrapping of the underlying API is, well CWnds have different lifespans to the handles they wrap, as well as different restrictions. CWnds are for example not particularly thread safe - whereas its completely safe to access an HWND from many threads (and processes) at the same time.

All that said, if you want a mature c++ development environment thats good for writing GUI apps that can run on MacOS, Windows and Ubuntu: Qt Creator might be worth a try. Its far more independent of the underlying native API than MFC, but I can confirm that projects written in the Qt framework (using Qt Creator) can just be rebuilt to run on MacOS just as easilly as Windows.