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I've always wanted to learn GUI development like wxWidgets and the like. But I've found most of the documentation lacks organization of actually creating a program. I've recently been using wxDev-C++ and love the wxform feature of building an application. I knew codeblocks had it with wxsmith but I've always had a hard time building wxWidgets from scratch. I was just wondering, do most of you who make multiplatform GUI aps use a RAD tool like this, or do you dare to code everything.
In the past I've used RAD tools when working with Windows Forms and Swing, but since I've started learning wxWidgets, I've been coding everything myself, in part because I've heard the wxWidgets RAD tools are rather buggy.
I find RAD tools only useful for the earlier stages of development where I'm laying out controls in a window. wxWidgets-based DialogBlocks was, in my opinion, an excellent buy on this regard.
What I do is then move the generated code to my VC++ project and... heavily alter it to fit my style and needs.
Other than that, I strongly advise against RAD development for wxWidgets. As Psycopath mentioned there's bugs. But also, code gets generated that is often unnecessary, almost always bad, and never right.
Not right, because you'll often find yourself needing a library feature that the RAD tool doesn't offer and changing the code to use this feature will break your RAD project file and render it useless. As a simple example, try to use wxNewID() to generate control identifiers under DialogBlocks and you can kiss goodbye your DialogBlocks project.
I do use DialogBlocks. But only for control placement.
If you have trouble creating wxWidgets applications for scratch get their book. It's a most excellent wxWidgets manual.
What about Qt rad tools?