Migrating from C# to native windows C++

I w开发者_如何学Cant to develop native c++ windows application using windows API. but i find it being difficult because i am unable to render the window and drag and drop components, change the location etc..

How can i view, drag and drop components like i can do in C# ?

May be there is no way to do. if so, what is the fastest procedure to design the application ?

If you like so much the drag and drop of components (and of course for good reason) why would you need to develop it using C++? You can use PInvoke if you need to call some C++ functions from C# code that are not in the .net framework.

But if you really insist, maybe you could try QT.

Using a library framework such as Qt is really the way you want to go. It makes things very simple and still allows you to write code in std c++ to keep most things very fast.

If you EVER have intentions of porting the code to a different platform than windows (whether it be Mac, Linux or even Android ... yes its possible), qt is definately the way you're going to want to go.

I can get an app up and running... smoothly in a few minutes using Qt but much longer and with more confusion using MFC.

Dragging and dropping 'widgets' to form a gui is very easy and possible with Qt's built-in QtDesigner!!! Check it out!!!

http://qt.nokia.com/downloads

Assuming you are using Visual Studio, if your app can be implemented as a dialog box, then you can use the dialog editor to lay things out. Otherwise, you just have to write code to create the windows and place controls. Look at the MFC examples included with Visual Studio.

Jeff Prosise's PROGRAMMING WINDOWS WITH MFC was one of the better books for learning how to do this, but I think it is out of print, and so could be hard to find.

Charles Petzold's PROGRAMMING WINDOWS is the bible for the Win32 API. Again, may be hard to find these days.

If MFC isn't your cup of tea, you could also look at QT, GTK+, or wxWidgets. There are GUI builders for each of those, but they are all pretty primitive compared to what you can do with C#.

As far as I know there is no ide out there that will let you "drag and drop create" standard win api windows like you would with C#.

Personally for that kind of application I always recommend Borland C++ Builder (Which is now Codegear Rad studio)
Although it is not standard API, it allows you to drag an drop and static linking is very easy, so you dont have to worry about redistributables