what to do if you want an opengl app to run on windows, but do not want to use any commercial software in the development process? So, no Visual C++, no MFC, no QT can be used. I am looking for something like it is with linux, where compiling is done with gcc and for GUI, openmotif is used. Is something like that possible with windows?
What do you mean by not using any “commercial sofware” (no Visual C++)?
There is very good Visual C++ IDE available completely for free (also for commercial development).
It is called Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition, and is available here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/visualc/
After posting my question, I found VS Express, downloaded and installed it. However, it seems not to be so easy to get started with OpenGL. Does someone have experiences with this?
The free MS IDE are actually advertisment for Microsoft products.
With recent versions I found it almost impossible to work on cross platform stuff. All the stdlib string manipulation are disabled (should pass as warning, but no, it prevents linking ).
I recommend Dev-C++ as IDE (it uses mingw/gcc as compilation backend), it is very easy to download “packages” (templates) to start working on OpenGL (with/without SDl/Glut/freeglut/ etc).
(I have no experience with c/c++ GUI )
But yes it exists :
There is a wxWidgets package (DevPak).
And an extension to design widgets : http://wxdsgn.sourceforge.net/
To use VS Express Edition you must install also Platform SDK which will give needed libraries to link OpenGL applications. It is easy to install it, just follow instructions here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/visualc/usingpsdk/
After that, there will be no problems with OpenGL/DirectX or any other system libraries. wxWidgets also works well with VS EE.
@martinsm: no of course not i love to struggle for nothing and i hate searching/reading readmes/instructions/manual…seriously not only i had problems with opengl but also when compiling opencv ok lets stop talking about this we are way OT here