Making GUIs With C++.

[Vermillion]

Can someone give me a good tutorial or name a me book to learn to do so? I have Visual Studio 2008, and the integrated GUI builder looks good but I don't know how to use it. I also want to learn the MFC, but no luck finding tutorials for that either.

[RichardRotterdam]

not sure about the MFC framework since I don't like building stuff that works on MS only. however usually microsoft has excellent documentation about their stuff. Have you tried http://msdn.microsoft.com/ ?

 

if that doesn't help you can always try an alternative framework http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Foundation_Class_Library#Other_frameworks. I'm concidering to learn GTK myself

[eZe616]

There is also Qt for cross-platform GUI's. I believe they have an open source license. They don't support VS for the open source version.

 

Other then that here are some tutorials for GUI programming. Some of them are mostly for C, but they should get you started.

 

C:

http://www.winprog.org/tutorial/

http://zetcode.com/tutorials/winapi/

 

C++:

http://www.relisoft.com/win32/index.htm

[exally]

If you are have VS2008 ignore MFC completely. It is good if you want to your custom classes imported into, but really you should be looking to update you coding to Windows Forms .NET either in C# or C++. The conversion is a simple one from C++ to C#.

 

The fact is that MFC and Windows Form acts in the same way, you have a simple designer that you can create nice forms and what not in. You then interact with the object using either event handlers in .NET and the linked object in MFC.

 

The hardest thing to do in WF is the string manipulation but once you learn you have System::Convert::To<type>(); or basically everything has a .ToString() function attached it is easy.

 

BTW to load forms from other forms is simply

 

Form2 frm2 = new Form2()

frm2.Show() or frm2.ShowDialog();

[Vermillion]

I tried the MFC, but it is quite complex, guess I will wait till university to learn that .

In the meantime, I want to learn GTK, but I have no idea of how to install the libraries. Everytime I try, I fail at it >>;. Maybe someone can help me install the libraries to VS2008, or just recommend another good compiler which already has them installed?

[RichardRotterdam]

did the gtk bundle installer not work?

http://www.gtk.org/download-windows.html

[Vermillion]

I don't get how to install it :

 

This is a bundle containing the GTK+ stack and its dependencies

for Windows.  As such it is nothing more than a combination of the

individual packages it

consists of. For a list, see

share/doc/gtk+-bundle_2.14.4-20081018_win32/components.lst. Both run-time and developer packages

are included.

 

This bundle is

intended for software developers and packagers. You are

expected to know what to do with it, more or less.

 

To use it, create some empty folder like

c:\opt\gtk . Using either

Windows Explorer's built-in zip file management, or the command-line

unzip.exe

from

ftp://tug.ctan.org/tex-archive/tools/zip/info-zip/WIN32/unz552xN.exe

unzip this bundle. (But you presumably already did that, as you are

reading this

file.)

 

Then add the bin folder to your PATH. Make sure you have no other

versions of GTK+ in PATH. Run:

    pkg-config --cflags gtk+-2.0

and verify that it

prints out something reasonable. Run:

    gtk-demo

and verify that it works.

 

To use the MS-Windows theme engine, creata a file etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc

containing the

line:

    gtk-theme-name = "MS-Windows"

[corbin]

You need to set your compiler to know where the bin, include and lib folders of the GTK pack are.  That should be about it.  (Didn't download it my self to look.)

 

 

Also, if the individual components they mentioned are in subfolders, you will need to add those directories also.

[Liquid Fire]

wxWidgets is another option for cross-platform.