It has been a few years since I did any development for PCs (I usually do embedded software).
At that time I was highly proficient with (Borland, now CodeGear) C++ Builder. Time has moved on, C++ Builder has become extremely expensive and there are alternatives (MSVC studio, NetBeans, QtCreator, maybe even Eclipse with the right plugins). Others?
Three things concern me (in no particular order), ease of use, additional GUI components and cross-platformness.
Ease of use - I want an IDE which helps, not hinders me. Good debugger, refactoring, jump to variable declaration, usage, that sort of thing ..
GUI components - when using C++ Builder I was impressed by how easy it was to develop additional VCL components and how many were available, often for free. Thus if I wanted a standard string grid where the cells also could contain pictures, checkboxes, etc, I could probably find one, or roll my own.
I am not sure what the current state of play is with respect to add-on components. Do other systems have anything like http://www.tmssoftware.com/site/ ?
Cross-platform - I personally use Linux for everything, but realistically, the majority of my users have Windows installations. So, cross-platform is "nice to have", "all other things being equal".
Now I have to pick a solution and stick with it for the next few years. Which one, given my points above (cost plays a role, but is not make/break)?
Thanks in advance for your help.
I never used C++ Builder but used to be a big fan/user of delphi. I normally work on server apps in c++, with some java. Reciently I started writing some small productivity apps for myself originally I used java, but then moved to Qt.
Now I love it. The library feels well designed just like vcl did in delphi. The signals/slots mechanism is great, I am still surprised how often I don't have to write code to wire up a dialog box. Using qt is easy and the code you write is very easy to read and create. I haven't yet had to write my own widgets, I think qt's model/view architecture splits the roles very well making the stock widgets very powerful. For example when using a QTableView most display and editing functions can be provided by the ItemModel, more powerful control is provided by an ItemDelegate. I have found these easier to reuse than writing custom widgets although it seems easy enough from looking at the documentation.
Qt creator is basic but does 95% of what I require, integrated project, gui designer, code, debug and help. Has support for CMake as well as qmake. It doesn't have advanced features like refactoring, but the intelli sense better than VS2005. However the next version of KDevelop looks very promising and will include these. You could also use eclipse if you wanted these features, or move between eclipse and qt creator as required. But I am very happy with qt creator.
On the cross platform issue, I develop my apps on Linux at home and tend to use them on windows in work. So far everything that works on linux works just work windows and looks like it was written for it too.