C++ – Advice for C++ GUI programming

cvisual c++

I have been writing C++ Console/CMD-line applications for about a year now and would like to get into windows GUI apps. For those of you who have taken this road before, what advice/tips can you give me. Ex: good readings, tutorials, approach tactics, etc…

I know this is a really broad question, but i really don't know how/where to start, thus not knowing how to ask this question properly.

Best Answer

I highly recommend the use of the Qt Libraries for several reasons:

The Framework is freely available for Windows, Linux, MacOS X, and a couple of mobile systems. Since version 4.5 the license is LGPL, which basically means that you can use Qt even in commercial applications.
The design of Qt is out-standing, e.g. they use modern design patterns and a very consistent interface design (I don't know many other libraries that use object-oriented ideas in such perfection). Using Qt is the same as using Boost: it will improve your own programming skills, because they use such beautiful concepts!
They are bloody fast, for instance in rendering (due to the different back-end for OpenGL, DirectX, etc.). Just have a look on this video and you see what can easily be done with Qt but is hard to achieve with native Windows, Mac, or Linux programming.
They have a really great documentation, with tons of tutorials and a very good reference. You can start learning Qt easily with the given docs! The documentation is also available online, so have a look and see by yourself.
As mentioned before, Qt is cross-platform; you have one source-base that works on all the important operating systems. Why will you limit yourself to Windows, when you can also have Mac and Linux "for free"?
Qt is so much more than "just" the user interface; they also offer network and database functionality, OpenGL bindings, a full-working web-browser control (based on WebKit), a multimedia playback library, and much much much more.

Honestly, I wasted a couple of years by developing software natively for Windows, while I could have been so much more productive.

Related Solutions

C++ – What are the rules for calling the base class constructor

Base class constructors are automatically called for you if they have no argument. If you want to call a superclass constructor with an argument, you must use the subclass's constructor initialization list. Unlike Java, C++ supports multiple inheritance (for better or worse), so the base class must be referred to by name, rather than "super()".

class SuperClass
{
    public:

        SuperClass(int foo)
        {
            // do something with foo
        }
};

class SubClass : public SuperClass
{
    public:

        SubClass(int foo, int bar)
        : SuperClass(foo)    // Call the superclass constructor in the subclass' initialization list.
        {
            // do something with bar
        }
};

More info on the constructor's initialization list here and here.

C++ – Sleep for milliseconds

In C++11, you can do this with standard library facilities:

#include <chrono>
#include <thread>

std::this_thread::sleep_for(std::chrono::milliseconds(x));

Clear and readable, no more need to guess at what units the sleep() function takes.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

C++ – What are the rules for calling the base class constructor

C++ – Sleep for milliseconds

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