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I'd agree with millstone Every few years MS pushes a new UI framework (MFC, WTL, WinForms,WPF, WinRT, SilverLight) and abandons it after a few years. Other than Win32 which is not easy to use there really is no obvious choice which framework to use.

If I had to start a new desktop app for Windows I would probably go with Qt. I would not trust MS.




We still use win32 with a light weight C++ abstraction we wrote ourselves (like MFC but better). It's not really complicated or hard.

MFC+Win32+WinForms are equivalent with different wrappers. So is WPF/WinRT/Silverlight so that's actually only two tech platforms.


I agree that going with Win32 + your own wrapper is probably best in the long run.

As far as WPF/WinRT/Silverlight go, they are different enough that it's hard to exchange any code between them or port from to another.




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