RFC on how to start using wxWidgets.

[Milan Babuskov]

Jurko Gospodnetić wrote:
>   * We plan on using our old compiler/IDEs (mostly Microsoft Visual 
> Studio 7.1) and edit wxWidget forms using a separate designer 
> application. Designing GUIs without a visual designer tool would seem to 
> cause way too many maintenance headaches and increase the time needed to 
> design a single GUI element to way over any acceptable limit.

I used to have different approaches, but I finally settled with 
wxFormBuilder. It's built with wxWidgets itself, is stable and working 
really good. Although it can create XRC files, I'm using C++ code 
generation and do what authors suggest: create GUI and generate class, 
then derive your own class from it and have complete control over it. 
This way you can easily go back to visual editor and change visual 
things without it having any direct effect on rest of your code.

This approach was hard to get used to at first, but latest 3.x versions 
of wxFormBuilder are excellent and even have event-handler support.

> We can always use 
> code samples generated by a designer as templates but the resulting code 
> would not be under any designer's control. Any changes relating to the 
> model need to be typed in (and processed) explicitly by the programmer.

I did this before, but I found that wxFormBuilder approach with deriving 
classes is much more flexible and easier to use, and I have more time 
for making my own stuff instead of manual fiddling with GUI.

-- 
Milan Babuskov
http://www.guacosoft.com
http://www.flamerobin.org