What is the quickest path to writing a lightweight GUI program on Windows?

Question

I want a small (< 30MB) standalone Windows executable (a single file) that creates a window which asks the user for the location of a directory and then launches a different program in that directory.

This executable has to run on XP, Vista, Server 2003, and Server 2008 versions of Windows in 32-bits and 64 bits on x86-64 architecture as well as Itanium chips.

It would be spectacular if we only had to build it once in order to run it on all these platforms, but that is not a requirement. This is for a proprietary system, so GPL code is off-limits.

What is the fastest way to put this together?

These are some things I'm looking into, so if you have info about their viability, I'm all about it:

• Perl/Tk using perl2exe to get the binary.
• Ruby with wxruby
• Learn MFC programming and do it the right way like everybody else.

Answer 1

You could do this in MFC and have an executable in under 100k. In general, if you want to keep the size of your executables down, you can use UPX to perform exe compression. If you want an example, take a look at uTorrent. It's a full featured BitTorrent app in less than 300k of executable.

Answer 2

What about a WSH script? It won't be an exe, right, but to ask for a folder I don't see the need for an exe file, much less a 30Mb one...

A 1Kb script, save it as whatever name you like with vbs extension and run it. This, in case it's not clear, asks you for a folder name and then runs calc.exe from the system32 subdirectory. You can of course do a lot better than this in 2 or 4 Kb.

Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
win = InputBox("Please type your Windows folder location.")
If Right(win,1) <> "\" Then
  win = win & "\"
End If
WshShell.Run win & "system32\calc.exe"

To add a Folder Browser dialog instead of an InputBox, check this out.

Clear benefits are:

• Simplicity (well, VB is ugly, but you can use JScript if you prefer), no need to compile it!
• Compatibility, works on every windows machine I have available (from 98 onwards)

Answer 3

Quickest way on Windows for a lightweight and fast GUI? One word.. Delphi! It lacks the 64 bit support for now but then FreePascal would come to the rescue.

Answer 4

wxWidgets; it's cross platform, free, open source and easy to learn

Answer 5

For all of its flaws, Visual Basic has historically been great for super-simple apps like this.

Answer 6

Python with either xwWidgets or Tkinter should be able to do this with almost no effort at all. Runs on everything, and py2exe will get you a standalone executable.

Answer 7

I'd use .NET and WinForms. The idea of scripted solution is appealing, but in practice I often find you end up jumping through hoops to do anything beyond the basic case and still don't have the flexibility to do everything you want.

Answer 8

Having a small stand-alone application and developing it quickly are, I'm sorry to say, usually conflicting requirements.

To be honest, given how incredibly simple the application is, I would write it in C with direct Win32 calls: one call to SHBrowseForFolder() to get the directory, and one to ShellExecuteEx() to run the program. Even MFC is far too heavy-weight for such a modest application. Set the C runtime to be statically linked and you should be able to keep the size of the stand-alone executable to less than 100k. A decent Windows C coder should be able to knock that up in less than an hour, assuming you have one to hand.

Answer 9

Similar to what Vinko Vrsalovic said, you can use a HTA application. It is as easy as building a webpage with windows scripting host functionality. I have built a few utilities with jscript and it is really easy and quick http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms536496(VS.85).aspx

Answer 10

These responses are unbelievable.

Visual Studio Forms editor lets you draw out WinForms and autogenerates the boilerplate GUI code (which is a pain in the ass at best for most other languages and toolkits). Then you can use C# or any other .NET language. .NET has stock widgets for file pickers. I could write that script in 20 minutes and it will run on every one of your target platforms for free. Draw out the GUI, drag-n-drop a file picker, fill out maybe two hooks to do the "launch a different file than they wanted" thing, done.

Answer 11

For my money Tcl/Tk is absolutely the quickest path. You can have a single file executable (including custom images, dlls, etc) using something called a "starpack" -- a virtual filesystem that is both tcl interpreter and application code. I think it would weigh in at maybe a couple megabytes.

From your specifications it would take me personally maybe 15 minutes to get a first working version.

Oh, and Tcl/Tk has a BSD license so it's more free than your typical free software :-)

Answer 12

I agree with the Tcl/Tk answer above. For more information about the starpack that he refers to, see: http://www.equi4.com/tclkit/ it's a Tcl/Tk interpreter available for various OS's all in about 1MB. In the past there apparently has been concerned about the look and feel of Tcl/Tk UI's, but this has been addressed by a new framework named "Tile" that supports the native look and feel of the user's OS.

Answer 13

I use HTA (HTML Application) for quick-and-dirty form & script applications. See Microsoft's HTA Developers Center for details and examples. This basically uses HTML for the form, and any HTML-accessible scripting language for the script. Normal browser security is bypassed so that you can get at almost all OS internals. The above site also contains links to several tools that nearly automate the scripting part for you.

Answer 14

For a quick and dirty GUI program like you said, you can use an AutoIt script. You can even compile to an exe.

For an GUI example of AutoIt, you can check my stdout redirect script in a previous answer here