I\'m looking to be able to build GUI applications quickly and painlessly as possible. I\'m competent (though not expert, and have no formal training) in C++, but have never used
I recommend codegear C++ builder (previously known as borland C++ builder) from codegear which comes with a 30 trial. The nicest thing about it is that the GUI provides you with components that you drop onto a form in a WYSIWYG fashion and make functional by adding code to handle the events it fires. It comes with a whole bunch of compontents out of the box and you can add 3rd party components to it too, like the awesome ExpressQuantumGrid from devexpress, or write your own. It's very powerfull if you know what you're doing but intuitive enough that a beginner can write a database CRUD application in about 20 lines of very simple code.