Why is Win32/64 insane. Ask your self that question. Use wxwidgets without dialog construction tool. You find its not exactly pretty.
Do the same with a plain Win32 API program and you will see that wxWidgets spares you a lot of work, even if you don't use a dialog construction tool.
Creating .RCs with Notepad is not particularly exciting to me ...
Basicly we lack a good dialog construction tool for Win32/64 that all users can use. That is the true problem. So far no one anywhere in the C and C++ worlds of open source have built one. The closest is in the Asm world. Not exactly friendly. Don't any one say Visual Studio that thing more often than not goes MFC and does not run well on other platform. Visual Studio itself does not run well on other platforms.
VIDE/LCC once had such an editor. It was not as elaborate as is Visual Studio's dialog construction tool, but it worked.
If I remember correctly, it was partially OpenSource.
Screenshot: http://assarbad.info/stuff/tutorials/nonvcl/reseditor.png
Related links: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~lcc-win32/ (LCC) http://www.objectcentral.com/downloads.htm (source code of VIDE!!!)
Note firefox does not use MFC or Wxwidgets it uses its own. Same with OpenOffice. Large project are unlikely to use either more likely to use something of there own construction. Reason suited to there needs..
Right, but these projects use their own *frameworks*. No one in such a big project would ever say: hey, let's use the plain Win32 API, we need no freakin' framework. This is the case because they want to be platform-independent to some extent and because it is insane if they would do it.
So yes, they don't use wxWidgets, GTK, Qt, MFC or whatever else, *but* they *use* some kind of _framework_.
I agree, C has its right to exist and Win32 API as well. If you look at my website you will actually find more direct Win32 API samples than samples using a framework. So it is not that I am against it per-se and tools like Notepad can be conveniently written using the Win32 API only. Even Wordpad, but that's about the size where one should stop and rethink the usage of plain Win32 API and consider creating or using some framework.
Oliver