wxWidgets (http://www.wxwidgets.org) is a Cross-platform GUI Toolkit in C++. It is very similar to MFC. It supports several compilers in different platforms. Also wxWidgets can be compiled in different builds, e.g. Static, Dynamic, Unicode, Monolithic, etc. Beginners often finds it difficult to compile their first application properly.
Code::Blocks (http://www.codeblocks.org) is a Free, cross-platform IDE written in wxWidgets. The best part of this IDE is that it supports a host of compilers in defferent platforms. It runs in Windows and Linux. The look-and-feel and the power remains same. If you’re coding C, C++ and never tried this, I would recommend this to try.
The wxWidgets project wizard of Code::Blocks works well with GCC and MSVC 6, but only Unicode Monolithic build of wxWidgets. The MSVC 8 support was lacking. I started this work as I could not compile my application with Code::Blocks properly with MSVC 8. The existing code has been heavily modified and a lot of new features have been added to the wizard.
New Features:
- Option to select wxWidgets 2.6.3 or wxWidgets 2.8.0 version libraries (See screenshot below).
- Supports static, dynamic, ANSI, Unicode, Monolithic builds of both versions of wxWidgets.
- Option to add additional libraries of wxWidgets if the user is not working with Monolithic build (See screenshot below).
- Added support to MSVC 8 and Borland C++ 5.5.1 compilers.
- Additional compiler flags have been added for MSVC 8. Checks are in place to ensure that they don’t come up with MSVC 6 or 7.1
- Debug target now generates Win32 GUI app instead of Console mode app. It also links against Debug build of wxWidgets.