Win32GUI Generics Homepage
When I found this project I thought I had found the holy grail. An advanced use of C++ for user interface purposes. I looked past the screenshots on the website which seemed odd, but downloaded it anyway. The last release of the project and any active development was nearly a year ago.
It certainly pressed all the right buttons for me. It was a wrapper for the Win32 API with aspirations to be cross-platform. I encountered my first set of problems when I tried to get it to compile, you shouldn't use the solution files for Visual Studio. There is a "build library" utility that works with Visual C++ 8.0. I got a few examples up and running with minor project file tweaks like include directories, and found that custom draw buttons were not XP themed so I hacked in a small theming API.
All seems okay so far. The biggest problem I found was the resizing, it caused massive amounts of flicker. Having solved a lot of similar problems in MFC I tried to get it to flicker less with no success. Then attempting lots of other examples I found they simply crashed or would not compile. Most disappointing was I could not have a look at the new "Surfaces" version of the library.
The compiled size of the library is massive with large amounts of global static data. I found building a bit pot-luck. I had to configure the Boost Jam files to not use iterator debugging or safe iterators.
The thing is I really like this library and it seems really powerful, but simultaneously lacks a little robustness. There is a lot of work to be done on this library to make it ready for the primetime which is really unfortunate. John Torjo definitely deserves a pint of beer for fantastic and thought provoking work.
There is a great little article about it here.
