GUI programming c++ or c# [closed]

Answer 1

Well, I couldn't possibly give a better answer than Dr.Deo, but I can share my bit. I used to do a lot of GUI programming before (more than 5 years ago, with Borland's VCL in either Delphi or C++). I recently had to produce a GUI for a little project, so I went for Qt4. I was able to almost entirely finish the GUI in one day without any prior knowledge of Qt4 (of course, it was a simple, one-window GUI). I found it very easy to use and quick to learn. If you have any GUI experience at all, it will be very intuitive. As for C++ knowledge required, it's minimal. You have to be comfortable with a fair dose of inheritance and polymorphism, but that is very typical of GUI tools and it really is just basic C++ knowledge of OOP.

I think several people have already made the point about being cross-platform. This will be more and more important in the future as alternatives to Windows are becoming mainstream (basically all the people I work with either have a Mac or run a distro of Linux) and as more in-between phone and tablet-PC products are emerging.

And, anyways, the language you use for programming a GUI isn't really that important, it is the tool-set. I think Qt4 is very complete. It also save you the trouble of interfacing to your existing code (let alone learning C#). Finally, Qt4 is very nicely usable with any IDE or build system (if you don't want to switch your code to qmake and/or Qt-Creator).

Answer 2

As @David Heffernan said, don't worry about cross platform unless you must have it (premature optimization). There is a price to pay for that flexibility that most cross platform kits offer. Further, from my years of experience as both a developer and a user, native platform toolkits generally offer a better end user experience (often less surprises about what and how the user is allowed and not allowed to do with each control or surface).

In a learning environment, you want to consider what you hope to accomplish in a semester. A typical three month overall semester schedule with successive milestones suggests you'll want low friction. Learning a gui library can be an excellent achievement, but you'll probably want some basic familiarity with at least the environment or context before you get started in order to actually complete the intermediate tasks in a timely manner: presumably interactions and otherwise general user experience are at the core of the class' focus.

For these reasons, I would consider sticking with c++, as you have a sense for the paradigm and fundamentals of the language and tools. But, because it is a learning environment, I would strongly consider something less mainstream, but ripe with potential in the library. I might look at hardware accelerated windowing libraries, either OpenGl based xgl if targeting unix/linux, or Windows Presentation Foundation if targeting Windows.