.NET (specifically C++ .Net) and GUI Development?
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First, I tried posting queries similar to this one on various Usenet newsgroups that seemed reasonably appropriate (including MFC, .Net, and Borland newsgroups) -- the response was thunderous silence. I know what follows are newbie questions, but please be kind and patient and help a guy out. I am basically a hobbyist programmer, at the moment doing a little work experimenting with some AI stuff. I learned C++, and then tried to teach myself MFC using MS Visual C++ 6.0. At the time I swore off of MFC, which a friend has described as "building a house using toothpicks", and have been playing with Borlands C++ Builder. In C++ Builder, creating forms and other GUI elements is much simpler than MFC, very similar to Visual Basic. Unfortunately, Borland's product is rapidly becoming obsolete. In the store recently, I was looking at the C++ .Net package. On the back, it still mentioned MFC, but it also claimed that the .Net environment has a user-friendly forms builder. My question: How friendly, and how good? What I'd be looking for is something like the Visual Basic technology: You select a new form, there's your form on screen. You have a palette of widgets (text boxes, scroll boxes, buttons, check boxes, etc.), and you can drag them to the form and place them easily. For any widget (I forget the formal, technical term), VB provided a list of both properties you could set, and also all the functions that could be called for that widget. The behind-the-scenes stuff -- like making sure a control knew that it was, indeed, part of the form -- was all handled behind the scenes. If you've used it, you know how easy it is. My first question, then, essentially, is whether creating display forms in Microsoft's C++ .Net environment is just as easy as doing so, or very nearly as easy as doing so, as in Visual Basic? I want to be able to focus on underlying algorithms, and have my GUI display design (and user interaction design) be EASY. The second question is, as a kind of "Plan B", are there any add-ons to VC++ 6.0 (preferably open-source, shareware, or not-too-expensive, in that order), which create a kind of Visual Basic forms design functionality within the Visual C++ 6.0 environment? My main focus is on the underlying logic of the AI stuff I'm playing with, so I don't need to do anything to fancy with my GUI. Just basic check boxes, radio buttons, and drop down menus for setting some options (and an "OK" button here and there); and some text boxes and paint areas for displaying results. As I indicated
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First, I tried posting queries similar to this one on various Usenet newsgroups that seemed reasonably appropriate (including MFC, .Net, and Borland newsgroups) -- the response was thunderous silence. I know what follows are newbie questions, but please be kind and patient and help a guy out. I am basically a hobbyist programmer, at the moment doing a little work experimenting with some AI stuff. I learned C++, and then tried to teach myself MFC using MS Visual C++ 6.0. At the time I swore off of MFC, which a friend has described as "building a house using toothpicks", and have been playing with Borlands C++ Builder. In C++ Builder, creating forms and other GUI elements is much simpler than MFC, very similar to Visual Basic. Unfortunately, Borland's product is rapidly becoming obsolete. In the store recently, I was looking at the C++ .Net package. On the back, it still mentioned MFC, but it also claimed that the .Net environment has a user-friendly forms builder. My question: How friendly, and how good? What I'd be looking for is something like the Visual Basic technology: You select a new form, there's your form on screen. You have a palette of widgets (text boxes, scroll boxes, buttons, check boxes, etc.), and you can drag them to the form and place them easily. For any widget (I forget the formal, technical term), VB provided a list of both properties you could set, and also all the functions that could be called for that widget. The behind-the-scenes stuff -- like making sure a control knew that it was, indeed, part of the form -- was all handled behind the scenes. If you've used it, you know how easy it is. My first question, then, essentially, is whether creating display forms in Microsoft's C++ .Net environment is just as easy as doing so, or very nearly as easy as doing so, as in Visual Basic? I want to be able to focus on underlying algorithms, and have my GUI display design (and user interaction design) be EASY. The second question is, as a kind of "Plan B", are there any add-ons to VC++ 6.0 (preferably open-source, shareware, or not-too-expensive, in that order), which create a kind of Visual Basic forms design functionality within the Visual C++ 6.0 environment? My main focus is on the underlying logic of the AI stuff I'm playing with, so I don't need to do anything to fancy with my GUI. Just basic check boxes, radio buttons, and drop down menus for setting some options (and an "OK" button here and there); and some text boxes and paint areas for displaying results. As I indicated
Hi Steven, I am a more Java And C# oriented guy who knows C++ too. VisualStudio.NET for any langauge is super easy, akin to Borland's Delphi 6 IDE or better. The base is the Framework Class Library which still allows you to do unmanaged code (read:pointers) and play with MFC's "toothpicks" (LOL) C# is pretty robust and easy though, and you should be able to use the upgrade wizards to pretty easily transform your project to the .NET environment from 6.0, and the IDE is like using VB 6.0 with a few minor changes. The intellisense and DYNAMIC HELP is well worth the investment in VisualStudio, and you can get it pretty cheap in some places. Again, just my opinion. Practice sesquipedalianism! ;)
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First, I tried posting queries similar to this one on various Usenet newsgroups that seemed reasonably appropriate (including MFC, .Net, and Borland newsgroups) -- the response was thunderous silence. I know what follows are newbie questions, but please be kind and patient and help a guy out. I am basically a hobbyist programmer, at the moment doing a little work experimenting with some AI stuff. I learned C++, and then tried to teach myself MFC using MS Visual C++ 6.0. At the time I swore off of MFC, which a friend has described as "building a house using toothpicks", and have been playing with Borlands C++ Builder. In C++ Builder, creating forms and other GUI elements is much simpler than MFC, very similar to Visual Basic. Unfortunately, Borland's product is rapidly becoming obsolete. In the store recently, I was looking at the C++ .Net package. On the back, it still mentioned MFC, but it also claimed that the .Net environment has a user-friendly forms builder. My question: How friendly, and how good? What I'd be looking for is something like the Visual Basic technology: You select a new form, there's your form on screen. You have a palette of widgets (text boxes, scroll boxes, buttons, check boxes, etc.), and you can drag them to the form and place them easily. For any widget (I forget the formal, technical term), VB provided a list of both properties you could set, and also all the functions that could be called for that widget. The behind-the-scenes stuff -- like making sure a control knew that it was, indeed, part of the form -- was all handled behind the scenes. If you've used it, you know how easy it is. My first question, then, essentially, is whether creating display forms in Microsoft's C++ .Net environment is just as easy as doing so, or very nearly as easy as doing so, as in Visual Basic? I want to be able to focus on underlying algorithms, and have my GUI display design (and user interaction design) be EASY. The second question is, as a kind of "Plan B", are there any add-ons to VC++ 6.0 (preferably open-source, shareware, or not-too-expensive, in that order), which create a kind of Visual Basic forms design functionality within the Visual C++ 6.0 environment? My main focus is on the underlying logic of the AI stuff I'm playing with, so I don't need to do anything to fancy with my GUI. Just basic check boxes, radio buttons, and drop down menus for setting some options (and an "OK" button here and there); and some text boxes and paint areas for displaying results. As I indicated