Simple Windows Development Tools?

fwc asks: "Over the past few years, I've been fortunate to be able to avoid writing a Windows GUI application, however this good luck is coming to an end. In the next few weeks, I need to write a fairly simple application which will need to display data received from a serial port in a decoded (and graphical) form via a Windows GUI. Unfortunately, my skills in this area are out of date, since I haven't written any GUI apps for close to 10 years. Because this program needs to be fairly small and easy to install, the use of Perl/tk isn't a valid option. What options do I have to build a small application on Windows, without a large learning curve?"

Comments

VB

[ecklesweb]

Unless things have changed in the past few years since I played around with Windows GUI programming, Visual Basic is by far the easiest way to get a Windows GUI app off the ground.

Re:VB

[hey!]

I wouldn't dismiss this out of hand either.

Just because you can build a crappy app in VB by following the path of least resistance, doesn't mean you have to.

If it's a one off app with a simple UI that works the way your users would intuitively expect it to, this is precisely what VB is good for. If you think the UI required is "sophisticated", it might not look so for somebody who does a lot of UI work. Things get tricky when you have to coordinate a wide variety of user tasks.

You can also use Visual C#. It's really not any harder This would allow you to build your business logic around interfaces, allowing you to, for example, replace C# implementations with native C or with java or even php based web services later. You can also port to other platforms depending on how good Mono's Windows.Forms package is. Or you could build your app against GTK# and get portability right off the bat if that's important to you.

Visual studio...

[lscoughlin]

It's sad. Very sad. But if your tied to windows, then Visual Basic is the way to go. If you've got access to vs.net, c#'s gui builder is also pretty slick and the language is far less braindead to use.

Delphi is decent

[teeheehee]

I can't vouch for VB since I try to avoid it as much as possible, but I worked with Delphi at my last job and recommend it as an excellent rapid GUI development IDE and language.

There are lots of extensions to the component palette which are free (as in beer) and some that are free (gratis) which can be very helpful. I didn't do sockets programming but there are components for that, as well as for graphs. You might be surprised at how quickly you can pick it all up, it's quite intuitive.

Win32 dialog only class

[NullProg]

I need to write a fairly simple application which will need to display data received from a serial port in a decoded (and graphical) form via a Windows GUI.

Write a simple Win32 program that uses a dialog class has its main window. Depending on how many elements your dialog needs to display, you could probably wirte this in less than two hundred lines of code. There are plenty examples on the internet to get you started. The result will be a small, tight and fast program that uses very little memory. As a bonus, your program will run on all 9x/NT versions of windows without extra dependencies, unlike the MFC/VB/C#/Wx/java frameworks other people are advising you to use.

Enjoy,

You expected Windows programming advice from /. ??

[ednopantz]

So far I have seen two spectacularly misinformed comments modded +5.

You aren't going to learn anything about Windows programming from slashdot. Too many people here are fighting the Linux Jihad.