Out of curiosity what do YOU use?
Which do I use? MFC. I don't prefer it over the WinAPI, it just means I don't have to repeatedly throw up on my keyboard while coding. I plan on looking into C# when I want to really start coding for windows, right now it's just little utilities and such.

MFC is slow.... hmmm somewhat slower than straight API but faster than everything else.
What's "everything else"?

It's the closest you can get to actually talking to windows. Everything else is a shell around the API.
Okay, does this make it any less retarded?