I'm refering to this type of interface:

I can do it with the engine in-game, but that would be very heavy(and power consuming if you're on an unplugged desktop) and I want to make a lightweight editor program where only a window in the middle is used for rendering and the interface around it controls what happens in the render window pretty much like any other engine editor.Now in Visual Studio you see every widget is custom and extremely beautiful, from the buttons to the sliders and also the awesome win8 style thumbnails in the product videos:


So can you direct me?Is this done with C++ and Win32?Or is it some HTML parser and made like a webpage?I'd prefer to use a C++ approach for squeezing every bit of performance and making it as lightweight and responsive as possible.

I believe the UI is written in WPF.

You could do something like that in C++, and it would potentially be more performant (depending on your own abilities), but be prepared for a lot more work.

If you're looking for "lightweight and responsive", then WPF is not your friend.

WPF and the associated tools at the very bottom do use win32 API (it's turtles all the way down...)

I have downvoted you because that statement is actually not true.

WPF takes care of all it's own drawing, event-handling, etc. From a win32 perspective, a wpf app is a blackbox with only one hwnd for the outer window, as opposed to say winforms, which simply wraps Win32 in a more developer friendly api.

WPF and the associated tools at the very bottom do use win32 API (it's turtles all the way down...)

I have downvoted you because that statement is actually not true.

WPF takes care of all it's own drawing, event-handling, etc. From a win32 perspective, a wpf app is a blackbox with only one hwnd for the outer window, as opposed to say winforms, which simply wraps Win32 in a more developer friendly api.

So, this needs a bit of expansion...

WPF, as it stands, is really a shitty platform to write for. Its great for small apps, and even some simple business apps.

However, the rendering system in it is really stupidly written. As if it was written by people who had no idea about how modern GPUs work, etc.

Visual studio did a lot of effort to optimize WPF and so the WPF that visual studio uses is NOT the WPF available to you in .Net.

...snip...

So, this needs a bit of expansion...

WPF, as it stands, is really a shitty platform to write for. Its great for small apps, and even some simple business apps.

However, the rendering system in it is really stupidly written. As if it was written by people who had no idea about how modern GPUs work, etc.

Visual studio did a lot of effort to optimize WPF and so the WPF that visual studio uses is NOT the WPF available to you in .Net.

Well, that just isn't true! Yes the rendering system is very complex and you can get hopelessly lost if you go against the 'WPF way', (and you can get lost as a beginner too) but it is very powerful.

WPF is absolutely fine for large applications as well as small - it is just .Net at the end of the day. I use it to write incredibly complicated business apps as part of my day job, and I've also written a reasonably complex resource editor and also a boned sprite editor outside of work. The size / complexity of the application has no bearing on whether WPF is suitable.

Visual Studio does nothing (visually) that you couldn't do in plain WPF. I'd recommend it as a platform where you want to customize the UI, but just beware the learning curve is quite steep at times, and long.