GUI Framework/Lib for C++ under Windows

Question

Hi! I was wondering is there an Microsoft alternative to MFC, except WinForms in GUI programming for Windows operating system ?

I dont want to use thirdparty (Borland/Qt/wxWindows) libraries. WinForms require .NET which is major problem (can't install .NET in destination machines) and MFC is traumatic to me...

Any alternative which would be close to Qt but Microsoft branded ?

I would appreciate any suggestions!

Answer 1

Try WTL. This library was originally created by Microsoft and then went open source. On the contrary with MFC, many developers report good experiences with it. It builds lighter executables, it is better structured than MFC, but also not so feature rich.

Answer 2

I don't think there's any. You can use pure WinAPI, ATL, WTL (in this case good luck!).

Why don't you want to use Qt? Its free, open source and very flexible tool.

Answer 3

There is not any. Do not waste your time for searching.

Answer 4

Any alternative which would be close to Qt but Microsoft branded

If by "close to Qt" you mean similar in design to Qt, then no - there is not. I use WTL and like it, but it is very different from Qt.

Answer 5

Although I love it and have used it extensively, WTL is quite an effort to learn as the documentation isn't great. There are some great 'WTL for MFC Programmers' articles on Code Project which are an absolute must-read.

However, if you want something Qt-like from MS, then you're only left with MFC I'm afraid. OK, it's long in the tooth but with the addition of the VS2008 SP1 MFC Feature Pack you can create Office 2007-like apps complete with ribbons. This might be your best solution if only MS non-.NET tech is allowed.

Answer 6

I too suggest WTL. Here is a list with some useful WTL links:

• MSDN's ATL 3.0 Window Classes: An Introduction - for the basics.
• WTL Articles by Chris Sells, Dharma Shukla, and Nenad Stefanovic part1 and part2. Nenad Stefanovic is the father of WTL.
• Bjarke Viksoe's WTL projects. Bjarne has summed many of his small projects into a whole application, an IDE - BVRDE.
• Code Project's WTL page. Watch out especially the articles written by Michael Dunn. VMware Workstation uses WTL and Michael Dunn works for VMware.
• Clipcode's WTL Developer’s Guide (doc, pdf, source code).

WTL opensource applications, which one can study to see various implementation tricks:

• Google's Chromium, source code here. The windows version uses WTL. I don't know if somebody has tried to extract the WTL framework from Chromium.
• Programmer's Notepad uses WTL, source code here.
• InfraRecorder uses WTL, source code here.

Answer 7

You could always go with the Windows API directly and bypass MFC.

Answer 8

I don't get it. If it isn't Win32 or MFC or Windows.Forms, then what you are looking for is by definition 3rd party.

All these people recommending WTL are recommending you download some third party project's toolkit and use it. That's fine, if that's what you are looking for. But if you do that, then I strongly suggest looking at Qt or wxWidget. The former for the most full-featured set you can get and the latter for drawing native widgets using a "more sane" API.

Aside: WTL may be downloadable from MS server, but its a far, far cry from a MS-supported technology. It is an unsupported add-on.