Everything You Need To Create Windows Apps With C++
When you want to create a new app for Windows 10 or a new version, Windows 11, the first decision you make is what type of app to build. No matter what your app idea is there is a great selection of Windows app development tools to choose from. Microsoft has focused it’s more recent efforts on the C# programming language and its own proprietary technologies of WPF, UWP, WinForms, and .NET MAUI. You can use Microsoft’s tools to create Windows applications but there are a couple of other options which give more independent functionality and with the added bonus of huge productivity gains. This article contains all the information you need to get started building apps in C++ for Microsoft Windows. I’ve started using Dev-C++ and had a lot of fun figuring out all the things I can do with console applications. I really enjoying building C++ Win32 desktop applications, sometimes called classic desktop apps. You can get the latest and updated version of Dev-C++ from the Embarcadero website. Embarcadero Dev-C++ is a new and improved fork of Bloodshed Dev-C++. This fork is sponsored by Embarcadero. Embarcadero Dev-C++ now has a modern UI and UX and some great new features too. Where can I find details on building Win32 desktop applications with The Dev-C++ IDE? Here is a brief article on building Win32 desktop applications using the Embarcadero Dev-C++ IDE. What are ‘Classic Desktop Windows Apps‘? Win32 desktop apps are the original app type for native Windows applications that require direct access to Windows and hardware. Because of this, Win32 native applications have the highest performance for GUI apps and easy direct access to system hardware. Using the Win32 API with C++ makes it possible to achieve the fastest app speeds and efficiency by taking more control of the target platform with ‘unmanaged’ code than is possible on a ‘managed’ runtime environment like .NET. Here are a few highlights of what the Win32 API offers to enable you to build high-performance applications: DirectX, Direct3D and DirectCompute Access to performance-oriented instruction sets like SSE and AVX through intrinsic functions Hardware level optimizations However, developing at such a level requires greater care and attention to get things right and it might take more development time. What is a faster and easier way to create GUI applications? While playing with C++ in the Dev-C++ IDE, I came across Embarcadero’s C++ Builder and then RAD Studio Delphi. Specifically, I started using Delphi with Visual Component Library which is often abbreviated to ‘the VCL’. The VCL is a set of visual components (ready-made blocks of code and functionality) for the rapid development of Windows applications in the Delphi language. The VCL includes dozens of ready to use visual components and a wide variety of non-visual components and utility classes for tasks such as: Windows 10/11 application building Database applications Client/Server applications Console applications and more With visual components such as the form, edit, button, panel components, designing and building graphical applications is much faster and more efficient than laboriously creating everything from scratch. In terms of UI libraries, the VCL has always been considered the best wrapper on the native Windows API. Moreover, Delphi and the VCL offer a much better encapsulation of the COM layer on Windows. Additionally, Delphi offers a great and […]
