Hello. I'm at a point where I'm starting to get tired of the ridiculous rectal discomfort that constitutes designing and coding a GDI window w/controls, etc. I need to be able to make design tools (map editors, file packagers, etc) for my games, but it seems like when I do I end up spending three times the effort on designing the interface as I do designing the functionality.

So I'm wondering if learning and employing .NET is something that would save me time in this area. Specifically, is it significantly easier to create/manipulate GDI based applications with .NET? The impression that I get from just glancing at it is that it's a sort of C'ish language for developing apps by using the same kind of underlying system that powers VB.

I guess what I really mean to ask is, is it really worth the time and effort to pick up this language just so I can crank out project-specific dev tools faster? I sort of don't want to spend the time trying to learn yet another MS API unless it's going to cut my design time by something like 25%.

Any advice/comments/suggestions much appreciated.

Hard to say without knowing what you're using now, but my first instinct would be to say yes, you definitely should.

IMHO, C# is a much nicer language than C, C++ or java.

As long as you're comfortable writing windows specific tools, .Net is a great choice.

.NET isn't a language on its own, its a framework that other languages run on top of much like javas virtual machine.
C# and VB.net are the main languages for it although there is a C++ dialect/port/superset/whatever and F# as 2 other microsoft made languages. There are several languages and ports of languages that are not made by microsoft aswell.

[quote name='Taken From Wikipedia']
Microsoft languages for .NET

• C#
  
• Visual Basic .NET (VB.net or just VB for short)
  
• C++/CLI (C++ for .NET basically)
  
• F#
  
• J#
  
• JScript.NET
  
• Windows PowerShell <- Wikipedia lists this one although I can't find any language called powershell for .net
  

Non Microsoft languages for .NET

• Axum
  
• A#
  
• Boo (python like syntax)
  
• Cobra
  
• M
  
• Oxygene
  
• IronScheme
  
• IronPython
  
• IronRuby
  
• Nermerle
  
• Phalanger
  
• P#
  
• Scala
  

The languages with iron preceeding them are essentially the language modified to run on .net, for example ironpython is python 2.x running on .net. It can be used as a standalone language or it is fully possible to embed it in another application (lets say written in C#) and use it as a python scripting engine for your application. Same goes for ironruby aswell but I don't think ironscheme can be used as a scripting engine (I dont know enough about it)
[/quote]
Using Visual C# Express (free version of visual studio with compatibility for C# only) is a pretty quick way of making windows applications. The built in forms designer works really well. There is also visual VB.net express and I believe one for C++. Otherwise you need to get the full version of visual studio (not free) to develop in multiple languages. An alternate IDE is sharpdevelop but I just don't find it as nice to use, it does however feature ironpython, ironruby, boo, C# and VB.net from a clean install.

You haven't mentioned what language your using to develop your games but if its one of the ones ported or capable of running on .net then the transition should be minute.




EDIT:
I should also mention that .net isn't windows specific. There is an alternate implementation compatible with pretty much all the same languages called mono. Mono can run on mac, windows and linux aswell as a few more obscure OS'es out there, for now though focus on .NET then you can port your project later if you wish to reach these market segments. There are several guides on porting .net projects in any language to run on mono for cross platform support.

Hello. I'm at a point where I'm starting to get tired of the ridiculous rectal discomfort that constitutes designing and coding a GDI window w/controls, etc. I need to be able to make design tools (map editors, file packagers, etc) for my games, but it seems like when I do I end up spending three times the effort on designing the interface as I do designing the functionality.

So I'm wondering if learning and employing .NET is something that would save me time in this area. Specifically, is it significantly easier to create/manipulate GDI based applications with .NET? The impression that I get from just glancing at it is that it's a sort of C'ish language for developing apps by using the same kind of underlying system that powers VB.

I guess what I really mean to ask is, is it really worth the time and effort to pick up this language just so I can crank out project-specific dev tools faster? I sort of don't want to spend the time trying to learn yet another MS API unless it's going to cut my design time by something like 25%.

Any advice/comments/suggestions much appreciated.

C# is almost as fast, almost as functional and a lot easier to use.
C++ is faster, more flexible and much harder to use.

So, unless you love C++ and hate C#, it's probably worth using. C# can load C++ dlls; I don't know if C++ can load C# dlls (never looked into it).

Edit: Also, Visual Studio Express comes in more flavours than just C#: Microsoft VSE download page

Firstly, thank you everyone for your advice so far.

Using C++. Sorry.

I've considered simply building in-game scenes to employ the needed functionality, but for some reason it just feels icky to me.

Mostly I'm just looking for something that will make it fast and easy to throw the window together, but still able to support whatever underlying code I want to use in it. I really prefer that the structs I use for packing data into a file are the same in both the reading and writing applications. Additionally, being able to use libs on both ends is sort of important, so that I can reliably make use of zlib for compression/decompression(for example).

If I were to use C# would I be able to use C libs normally or would I need to compile my functionality into a dll and then load that into a C# app? (Because that sounds like sort of a larger pain in the bum, tbh.)

Alternatively, is it worth messing with .NET if I only use it in C++?

Thank you again for your help here.

If I were to use C# would I be able to use C libs normally or would I need to compile my functionality into a dll and then load that into a C# app? (Because that sounds like sort of a larger pain in the bum, tbh.)

When you say "use C libs normally", I'm guessing you mean static linking to a .lib? In that case, no you won't be able to do that from c# and you will need to put it in a dll.

Alternatively, is it worth messing with .NET if I only use it in C++?

It's not as nice as C#, but it's probably still an improvement over raw C++. Winforms is a much nicer api than Win32.

It really depends on how big your C api is. If don't you have a lot of C functions, it will certainly be cleaner to wrap them in C++/CLI and call that from C#. Whether that's maintainable will depend on you. Potentially you could look into some sort of code generation from your .h files?