selecting an appropriate IDE

Question

Which one of the following IDEs/language will you recommend for developing a project under windows that involves recognizing hand gestures and interacting with the OS? I will be using OpenCV library for image processing tasks. After that I will be using win32 APIs or .NET framework to interact with the OS, depending on the tool you suggest. Performance is also a major issue.

• Visual C++ 2008 (using C++/CLI)
• Visual C++ 2008 (using native C++)
• visual C# 2008 (using .NET framework)
• Qt
• Dev C++
• Code::Blocks

Answer 1

If I understand you clearly, I think what you want to know is not the IDE to use, but the programming language/platform to use.

If you go for C++/C#, Visual Studio is a great IDE, but I hope you know that it is costly too. If that's fine with you, anyone on SO would highly recommend going for Visual Studio.

Visual Studio Express (freely available) is good if it is just an academic project.

Answer 2

It sounds like your targeting Windows and only Windows. As such I would stick with Visual Studio. It's a great IDE and is designed specifically for windows development.

Both QT and Code::Blocks are designed to be cross platform IDEs. I don't have a lot of recent experience with either of these IDEs. In the past I've found that they were great at providing tools for generating cross platform code but not nearly as good at helping you target the features specific to a particular operating system. If you are only intending to target one platform you will likely want to use some Windows specific features.

As for the language that depends a bit more on what you are actually doing and is overall a bit subjective. My personal advice though is to use C# unless there is a constraint preventing you from doing otherwise. For example if you had to write a driver which required C++ code.

Answer 3

If you are targeting C++ then there's absolutely no reason to use C++/CLI versus the native version. The only time I've ever used C++/CLI was for integration of a native C++ library with a managed code layer, to obviate the need to use COM interop.

Agree with Jared's suggestion to use C# (for speed of development) unless you have native code dependencies that require C++. I don't see any managed implementation of OpenCV mentioned here.

If you are targeting Windows only, then there's no reason to use Eclipse versus any version of Visual Studio >= 2005, unless you are totally familiar with Eclipse and a newcomer to VS.

Answer 4

Why not VS2010?