Here's what I want: I have a few extremely simple programming ideas I want to implement. The problem is that I want to implement them for other people for whom GUI is the only way to go. I want it to be light and portable.

Here's what I want to do: Simply put, I want to write a program that little more than a window with several buttons that do what I want it to do (for the sake of speed, let's just say 3 buttons and each button is a different hello world message. I know how to do the simple tasks I want to do). I'd like to know the best and fastest way to go from having nothing, not even an IDE or compiler, to getting this simple hello world program, preferably in a matter of hours. What I DON'T want is to hand this program off to someone and that someone has to download something else just to run it (i.e. I'm a little concerned about .NET and Java). Oh and on top of this all, I'd like to do this without spending any money.

Background: I've done a lot of C and C++ programming, with a little bit of experience in Windows API, MFC through Visual C++ 6.0. The trouble is that I no longer have access to Visual Studio. I've played around with wxWidgets in the past, but getting set up with a good IDE has taken some time and effort to figure it and getting it to do what I want.

Rationale: I have some devices at work that would benefit from a simple GUI interface, (minor little things like syncing up the time, which is currently done by manually typing it in). The problem is that I don't really have the budget or time to dedicate to learning how to do this. This is something that I can work on during my lunch break or for a little bit after work hours (I can stay late to work on it). To me, it seems like this is one of those things that someone should be able to do in hours rather than weeks (maybe even minutes), but I'm not sure what the right path is. I think wxWidgets is the way to go, but I'm not sure.

Anyone have any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

You can get Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition for free. Together with Windows Platform SDK (for free too) you can write native Win32 programs. For GUI, Trolltech's Qt is a good framework available for Windows/Linux/MacOS.

MSVC 2008 Express + wxWidgets + wxFormbuilder

I use this combination all the time.

I think with MSVC2008 Express it's no longer necessary to download the Platform SDK seperately (which used to be needed for MSVC2005 Express).

An alternative is Code::Blocks.

Well, take a look in Visual Studio Express 2008 VC/include directory. Then you'll see, there is no "window.h" anymore.