UI Designer for VC++ would be the killer app for wxWidgets

[2-Penneth-Worth]

GCC is a great compiler and it is free!!

As for size a -s to the linker strips out unneccessary symbols and reduces the exe considerably.

I have to say I have been using GCC 3.4.2 for a couple of weeks now in Linux, and cant say I noticed a huge difference in compile speeds, where unfortunately where GCC really lags big time

Standard win32 project with a menu, icon and cursor takes almost 2 minutes on GCC compared with 13 seconds using DMC and 38 seconds with OW 1.3

None the less GCC is an excellent tool, and will teach you a great deal about programming in the process.

For those who are looking for an alternative cross platform compiler, may I humbly suggest www.openwatcom.org

It has an amazing suite of development tools, the IDE is a little ugly but includes a complete resource editor and compiler and works with Linux Mac Windows so far, but is a lot faster than GCC

Cheers