Windows windows

[thenewkgb]

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WinUI
WinCLI
WinRT
WinUWP
WinCX
Win32
MFC

I will be checking out the Win32 + Irrlicht example pretty soon. I'm beginning to sway towards GUI interfaces and not solely game development. Along with the DirectX 2010 SDK are example projects involving dx9 and dx10. I didn't know how many people here knew more than me about them (and the choice of APIs. I'm a beginner in all of it). Also I saw quite a few posts about map editors here. Maybe I'd like to know how you all navigated the WinXX cobweb / multiple APIs for basically the same thing - Windows windows.

[CuteAlien]

I'm currently working with WTL, which is similar to MFC, but slightly more c++ oriented. Basically a wrapper around the native Windows API. Works mostly OK, thought I do run into some troubles once in a while (but getting Windows UI to do what you expect it to is often surprisingly hard).

MFC probably works just as well and I've used it with Irrlicht once. Again very close to the native Windows API.

Win32 directly - you can do that. But using MFC (or WTL) is usually easier.

As for other wrappers - I haven't tried combining Irrlicht with wxWidgets yet.But I used wxWidgets on it's own and it was probably the best experience I've had with a C++ library around the Windows API so far. Easy setup and was just nice to work with. But only used it in tiny projects. Bonus - it's cross-platform.

Qt is maybe the most standard library these days in professional companies (where the license cost basically doesn't matter). I used it in some minor project and worked with some other projects which used it. But not with Irrlicht. Downside - I had to compile it a few times already and that wasn't always a smooth experience, lots of wasted time there. Also had the bad luck to run into some bugs when using it (maybe I did too strange stuff). Once it does work it's probably the most feature rich UI library out there. Way easier to code than MFC or native Win32. For really large projects I'd probably go for that one. Also cross platform.