A question on GUI's for a begginer

Hi, I have a number of programs that I have created in the command line form. They work exactly how I want them to but I suppose my next step would be to create a nice little GUI to make them a little bit more user friendly. In the past I have used java and i've found this quite nice to make simple GUI's easily but with C++ i have to say i'm a little put off. Is there an easy way to do this? I got a hold of the borland c++ builder 6 but i found when i inserted my code into it it wasnt recognizing some of my syntax yet it worked well and command line level. I keep seing things like MFC flying about but I know not what this is so i please forgive me if my questions are maybe a little bit stupid but I guess what i'm asking is if anyone knows a good and simple approach to creating a nice and easy gui for my programs? Is there a particular path i should follow to develope skills in the GUI area?

any input will be appreciated

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Originally Posted by pastitprogram

I keep seing things like MFC flying about but I know not what this is so i please forgive me if my questions are maybe a little bit stupid but I guess what i'm asking is if anyone knows a good and simple approach to creating a nice and easy gui for my programs? Is there a particular path i should follow to develope skills in the GUI area?

any input will be appreciated

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Unfortunately, with C/C++, it's just not as easy because there's no standard way of doing GUIs.
Fortunately, there are lots of frameworks out there that can handle doing GUIs. MFC is one of them and is a Windows-only, non-free solution.
There are other free frameworks out there such as wxWidgets, Qt, GTK, Gnome and more.

It's a matter of finding one you think is best and sticking with it, then learning how to use it.

Since you seem to be programming for MS Windows, The Forgers WinAPI Tutorial is a good place to start. (Any Windows compiler can compile the WinAPI library.) Then if you want to really dig-in and learn WinAPI, get Petzold's book.

Microsoft is "pushing" .Net, but I think it's still useful to start with WinAPI.

I've never used MFC, but it's supposed to make Windows programming "easier". I think MFC and Borland Builder generate lots of the code for you. I chose to avoid that approach, because I wanted to understand what was "going on under the hood".

I disagree with the whole "learn what's under the hood" for Win32 API. Obviously, you can get away with it with dotNet or VB or the like, so I would suggest the same for C++.
Learning Win32 API will only give you headaches and you will probably forget it all at one time or another due to its complexity.
It's far better to use a framework such as MFC.
As a MFC dev, I have lots of experience and can MFC really does simplify things, but it's still a very fat wrapper, so an additional framework may be the way to go. Even so, even using MFC would require you to understand the basic principles of the win32 API while not using it, so you can't be wrong with going MFC-only.

i vote for wxWidgets!

I was under the impression that the Windows API was poorly designed and difficult to use which is why MFC is used kind of like a wrapper.

MFC does wrap it a lot, but it's way easier and faster than Win32 Api.

A vote for Qt.

Free, opensource, cross-platform (write-once-compile-everywhere), natively C++ (unlike GTK).

I have no experience in WxWidgets, but I have heard wonderful things about it.