What Windows GUI development tools would be best to focus on for learning/mastering? Suggestions/Reasons

I am trying to advance my personal skills in several areas including GUI development and I was wondering about tools / libraries currently available. At the company I currently work, most of our applications are MFC based (likely for historical reasons), but newer projects tend to be C# or even 开发者_JS百科GTK based.

I am aware of Qt as well, which seems to have a very good reputation.

Between MFC, Qt, GTK, C#, (and any others I'm missing), what is everyone using and what do they recommend for professional/personal projects, and why?

Are any of these dead in the water / futureless? (ie, is MFC worth learning relative to the others?)

Can anyone say from experience which of these tools gives the most design freedom (Qt, GTK > C#, MFC ?)

I hope this isn't too open-ended and close-worthy. I'm just looking for recommendations on a path to take to learn and improve and have useful workplace (and personal!) skills.

Thanks!

R

If you're using C#, Windows Presentation Foundations is the modern GUI technology. It allows you to build UI for desktop apps, as well as web apps (using Silverlight). WPF separates the graphic design from the UI logic in a way that was not possible before, so you'll also get to learn a new UI development method.

It seems that even Microsoft are heading more and more towards HTML5 + javascript, even for GUI for Windows 8. It might be worth checking out. Using that will be quite platform independent also.

C# is mainly a language, but for what you are asking, I'd suggest WPF and Silverlight (for the MS focused technologies). Outside of that, I'd be looking at things like Adobe AIR.

WPF gives a lot of power and freedom, but it has a semi-heavy resource cost. Silverlight would be useful due to the usefulness for Windows, Web and Windows Phone

Forget MFC, it's obsolete. C# is not a toolkit, it's a programming language. GTK is nice (that's what I use), but its Windows version is less maintained. So if you target Windows platforms, Qt and WPF should be interesting.