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Simple Windows Development Tools?

Posted by Cliff on from the no-bloated-IDEs-please dept.

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 Unfortunately, my skills in this area are out of date, since I haven't written any GUI apps for close to 10 years.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?"

5 of 255 comments (clear)

  1. VB by ecklesweb · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:VB by Fallus+Shempus · · Score: 5, Informative

      I'd agree from a complete programming novice
      but you've got a nice free choice (as long as it's not commercial code)
      if you have more experiance (especially C++)
      http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/

  2. Visual Basic by Sarlok · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's easy to learn and the GUI designer is also easy to use. What's more, with the new (2005) version, there is a free "Express" edition that you can download from Microsoft.

  3. Try Realbasic by Quiet_Desperation · · Score: 5, Informative
    I do mountains of Windows GUI crap to control my hardware designs via serial port and Ethernet. Realbasic makes it all easy and it's not as annoying as Visual Basic. Nicely object oriented. Even file i/o is OO.

    http://realbasic.com/

  4. Delphi is decent by teeheehee · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    "We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream."
    Schmendrick the Magician