Quickest (Easiest) GUI MFC or C# or QT or ?

Question

I have just finished my first real commercial application written in C++ / MFC.

The application consisted of agent installed on users workstations which in turn was controlled from a GUI Application on an administrators workstation. I choose C++ / MFC for these reasons.

1. Because I didn't know C#
2. Because I was not sure how long it would take for me to become as productive in a new lanuage
3. Because I did not want the hassle of installing the .NET runtime on workstations some of which might be W2K.

Now I am thinking of my second application which will again consist of an agent & a GUI Application. I am happy to continue on the same track with the agent for the reasons above but the GUI application will be much more complicated then the first. The first GUI app took a very long time to develop, was torturous and looked out of date even though it was freshly made.

Should I just bite the bullet with .net c# or look into something like QT.

TIA.

Answer 1

C# will almost definitely make you more productive!

Answer 2

Delphi. Produces stand-alone Windows executables which will work fine on Win2K (best OS Microsoft ever produced - this post is being written on it). Only disadvantage is Object Pascal, but if you know C++ it's very easy to pick up - and its was designed buy the guy who designed C#. The IDE is several orders of magnitude more productive than MFC with VS.

Answer 3

If you want really fast results, use .NET WinForms. Nothing beats the speed of putting together a GUI app and filling it with life, except maybe Delphi. The C# language and the .NET Base Class Library will also give you a huge productivity gain, even over the already great Qt framework. If you stick to the basic Windows Forms controls, it will even run on Mono.

WPF is even more productive once you're used to it, but getting used to it takes way more time than for Windows Forms.

Answer 4

on which platform will your second app run on? if it's XP and up i'll suggest C# / WinForms / GDI.

Answer 5

.NET C# is a very good choice for GUI applications more generally. It's simple, to-the-point and there are vast resources on the internet.

The only thing against it I can think of, is platform compatibility, but if you're limiting yourself to C++/MFC, that shouldn't be a concern to you.

Even if you want to go platform-independent some time later, you can make a separate Gtk in .NET on Linux (Mono, the open-source .NET framework). Heck, there's even a Cocoa (Mac OS X) binding, I just don't know how mature it is. Furthermore Windows Forms is largely supported in Mono already... it really surprised me how mature it is when I was trying it out, although my primary experience with C# is on Windows.

For GUI application, you won't regret using C#. Even if you want to go cross-platform, and certainly not if you intend to only target Windows clients.

Answer 6

I've done them all - a monkey can use C#, it's all drag and drop interfacing and public accessors. I wouldn't wish using MFC upon my worst enemy, and QT just wasn't as intuitive as C# for me. It's also really easy to make C# look nice. Difficult things like changing colors and flashing controls are trivial in C#. It also has built in styles to use. I use it professionally daily. The only time I use C++ is if I'm programming a server where every microsecond counts.

Answer 7

C# isn't that hard to adapt to, and there are literally a ton of examples online, and great books (the Head First one caught my eye as you can code a nethack clone and other fun projects). I've had to transition from C++ to C# myself, and it wasn't that rough at all (in fact it seemed like a pretty easy transition), and allowed me to rapidly prototype.

Good luck!

Answer 8

The first question would be exactly what caused the difficulty in developing the GUI with MFC. Was it inherent to MFC, or what it because you were learning something new, and didn't really know what you were doing? To put it slightly differently, if you had to do it again today, how would the difficulty compare?

Make no mistake about it -- MFC is an old design with far more than its share of problems, shortcoming and design flaws. .NET is a lot newer, but has far more than its share of problems, shortcoming and design flaws as well.

Along with that, .NET is just plain huge. It's reasonably well organized, which helps, but it still takes quite a while to digest the sheer volume of information necessary to use it well. Likewise, while C# (for the most obvious example) is a perfectly decent language, learning to use it well isn't an overnight task either. This is probably a smaller issue though: C# doesn't really have many new concepts compared to C++. Just for example, a competent C++ programmer can easily read C# almost immediately, and while he may not use it optimally, can also write bits of C# immediately as well.