wxWindows is a framework for developing cross-platform GUI applications in C++. Julian Smart started the framework in 1992 at the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute, University of Edinburgh. In 1995, a port to Xt was released by Markus Holzem. In May 1997, the Windows and GTK+ ports were merged and put into a CVS repository.
wxWindows supports many different platforms. It is developed as platform-independent as possible. Few classes (e.g. wxTaskBar) are platform-specific. Because these classes are wxWindows-compatible, it's possible that you add support to some platform specific functionality in your application without sacrificing the cross-platform goal. Whenever possible, the native controls that are available on the platform are used. Unavailable controls are emulated.
In order to avoid architecture dependencies, wxWindows offers various architecture independent types and macros such as wxInt32, wxInt16,... wxWindows has functions for multi-platform file handling. wxPathList, for example, avoids the difficulty with the file separation character.
First download the source-distribution of wxWindows. You can find it at the wxWindows website.
The distrubution contains many documentation and examples, but it is not always as accurate as you wish. This is because wxWindows is heavily developed and it is difficult to keep the docs up-to-date with the code. And when you don't find the information, you can always explore the source-code.
Information on how to install wxWindows can be found in the tutorial.
When I browsed the newsgroups and mailing-list, I saw that many persons, interested in wxWindows, were asking for a tutorial. I thougth: why can't I write down my experience and share it to the community? So I started one.
The tutorial is written with MS Word, but you can also find a PDF version (thanks to Julian Smart) in the download section of this page.
Nobody is perfect. So when you find errors, please report them to me. Remarks, updates and additions for this tutorial are also appreciated.
At the moment the tutorial is focused to the MSW version of wxWindows. But because wxWindows is portable, the tutorial should be portable too.
| wxTutorial.zip | Release 0.2 | The word document together with all the samples. |
| wxTutorial.pdf | Release 0.2 | The pdf-version. |
| Date | |
| 17-04-2001 | Release 0.2 : Chapter 7 complete. |
| 06-12-2001 | Release 0.1 : Chapter 2, 3, 4, 6, 7 and 8 are almost complete. |
| 17-12-2001 | Release 0.1 bug: DECLARE_APP macro added to all application classes. |
| 01-11-2001 | Release 0.1 : Chapter 4 with a new topic : Pluggable Event Handlers. Added an extra example : DimTextCtrl. Some text updated because of new version of wxWindows 2.2.9 |