As the title says, I'm trying to teach a friend (who is very familiar with C++ but not with WinAPI or any GUI development) an easy way to do GUI work.
My thoughts:
MFC - I know this best myself, but it's not always intuitive and he hates the mountains of auto-generated code.
WinAPI - I know this too, and I don't like it, it's too much code for simple tasks. Ideally it's something to know in the long run but for quickly making GUI apps, this seems like reinventing the wheel, repeatedly.
C++/CLI - don't know this at all but could learn. I've heard it makes GUI development easy. Learning new languages is easy for us both, as we both know many already.
C# - Same comments as C++/CLI
Right now we're both using VS .NET 2003 Pro so we can't do C++/CLI but we both have cheap sources of .NET 2005 from academic licensing so that's not going to be a real issue.