Which of these three languages is better for graphics?

[mitchba12]

I just got Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional from Microsoft's Dreamspark program because I want to finally graduate from TI-BASIC. Since I like to program games, I just wanted to know which one was right for the job. I don't want to be confined to the command prompt window. (I'm quickly learning that C++ has that tendancy, but I may be wrong.) If anyone would be kind enough to point me to a tutorial of your preffered language, that would be awesome too.

[JoeImp]

Depends on what you're trying to do really. None of those languages actually "do" graphics, they can just interface with apis for graphics. C# and VB can interface really easily with all the .NET form libraries for creating traditional windows forms and drawing some basic graphics here and there on them. For real graphics, you would have to interface with something like OpenGL or DirectX, which is basically the same amount of work in any of those languages. For real graphics, C++ is better performance wise than C# or VB just because of the internal structure of the language and how it's built/linked.

Before you get into any real graphics, you're going to be mostly stuck with console based stuff and learning how the language works first, especially with C++.

[DigiTan]

I've heard from the engineering community that C# is the best option to for .NET resources. In C++ you can do windows applications using forms or Windows MFC programming. Graphics-wise, I think all the high end stuff (graphing, 3D objects, lighting/shading is in OpenGL and DirectX.

USB is a little different. For the USB stuff I use, there's a company (FTDI) that offers a unique USB driver for their chips. Once you get the driver, you then download a .dll file for your C++ or VB.NET program to utilize. It's hard to say which is easier since they work through the same dll.

[mitchba12]

Ok, thank you. I just made a small Windows application in C++ that includes a label and an "OK" button. Anyone know how to make the "OK" button function and do something other than look pretty? I've been serching online and I haven't been able to find anything useful. Could you at least recommend a website I could look up? If there's a website that is anything for C++ like TI-BASIC Developer, I'd like to know. Thanks!

[DigiTan]

Sure. One thing you can do is double-click the button itself. This will open up the form.h file (substitute form1 for the form's name) and create a new function member called button1_Click. The code for the button click event can go inside the braces.

Right now, I'm learning from Ivor Horton's Beginning Visual C++ 2010 (about $35 on Amazon), and the Xoax.net tutorials on Youtube.

I could really use a tutorial on how to do openGL and graphing in C++.

[NETWizz]

It doesn't really matter; since, you are going to need to call Direct X anyway...