Going Visual..?
 

hi all;
im looking for advice in the visual field of programming.
ive learnt c++ at my university, and have taken all what there is to offer.
But now i want to advance to something visual. i want to be able to implement the same applications i do in c++, handling files, complex data structures.... simply what a developer would sell to a small firm to handle their records, stocks etc. My aim is to do that using some visual interface to run such operations. my collegues adviced me to learn java, visual c++, SQL, VB, even visio.. im looking for the optimal and professional choice. any suggestions? what language should i choose? why should i take that choice? how powerfull is that language over others ? and how can i learn it..
book name? tutorial??
thanks for your feedback :)

If you've already learnt C++, it would probably be best to stick to that. There are four "big" libraries for GUI development with C++: the Microsoft .NET Framework, Qt, GTK+ and wxWidgets. They all have their own pros and cons - check 'em out. It's worth bearing in mind that currently, C++ .NET only works on Windows, and both .NET and Qt have their own visual designers (Visual C++ and the Qt Designer respectively), whereas with the other two, you have to code the GUI yourself.

Just as an aside, SQL is a database querying language, and Visio is a Microsoft Office application used for drawing up charts, etc. Neither of them have anything to do with GUI drawing. Java and Visual Basic are different languages that have built-in support for GUIs, as do C# and Delphi. If you want to learn a different language, check out one of those (I recommend C# or Java, as they're similar to C++). Otherwise, it's best to stick to C++.

If you develop your application for windows, and don't want anything fancy,
then you can still use standard WINAPI dialog boxes, althought you will have to code quite a bit to
make even simple things to work, but this way your applications will be fast and small(and ofcourse, will not require megs
of external libraries to work.).

MSVC++, and probably many other IDE's has an inbuilt dialog editor.

You can find some useful tutorials in those places:
http://www.winprog.org
http://www.functionx.com/win32/

I have heard that Visual Basic is a good option too, probably because you can make GUI's quick and easy with it,
but I think you should stick with C++ if you already learned it.


Ofcourse you can use the easier way of MFC to do it, but it's
big size, slow speed, and confusing architecture had scared me away from it.

There is absolutely no reason to use the MFC over .NET. It's basically the same thing, only with less features and more crap.

However, I did miss out the Win32 API, which I basically forgot. Part of it includes the functions, macros, etc. used to draw GUIs natively. It's much faster than the other APIs to run, but hell to code.

There IS a reason to use MFC over .NET: if you don't want .NET, which is a distinct possibility. MFC basically sucks rocks, but is easier to use quickly than the raw API.

Makes sense. .NET is only supported by Windows 2000 and higher, so if you're trying to make a program for an older version, you can't use it.

I am interested in Qt.... I am programming in XCode and I had started learning Carbon API programming. But if possible, I want to make my programs portable. So, I checked upon Qt.

Any good startup points for Qt?

I am downloading the OpenSource version now. I think I will give it a try, since I saw it has OS X support.