New to windows programming need some guidance

Hi,

Over the past week i have decided to learn programming on myself. I have already made extensive researching on google, and found a couple of good sites and some good tutorials, yet there are still some things i can't figure out.

I have only studied qbasic about 7 years ago, and that is all i know about programming. The first thing i had to decide was which language i was going to learn and after doing some research i decided that i will learn c++. I have already started reading the tutorials on this page and already managed to do some small programming. I decided to you visual c++ as a compiler. Are these good choices??

The thing i can't figure out is the GUI. So after producing a program with visual c++, how do you then produce it's gui - i have come across win32, and tried using some of their code but i could not manage to figure it out. Also how do you eventually produce a .exe file?

I just need some badic explanation that's all

Thanks in advance for your help

Visual C++ or Borland C++ are what youre looking if you are serious.
What kinda GUI are you refering to ? Dialogs ? try http://winprog.org/tutorial/ for some cool tutorials.
An ok tutorial about win32 startup codes - http://www.functionx.com/win32/Lesson01.htm The win32 codes you generated from Visual c++ or any compiler will be alien to you at first but you will get the hang of it after awhile, basically you shouldn't change the format if you are a beginner, you should only edit the values in CreateWindowEx() the size of your window, the style of your window and the name. These are what you're interested now. Anything you compile will eventually result in a .exe file.
P/S Anway have you read about Structs and Class ( OOP ) ? if not, you should try learning how they work and how to access them at least coz most win32 api functions are written under them, they might look stupid but after some time, you will realize you have save lots of valuable time when they lump every relevant stuffs into one "OBJECT".

Dev C++ is also good, but it has many little oddities.