A little C++ work, Visual Studio or GCC?

Now that I've once more become addicted to coding, I'm daring myself to start dabbling with come C++ and OpenGL.

I have got a copy of Visua C++ 6 but I was just wondering if I really should make the effort to overcome Studio's horrible interface and actually try and get used to it, or if anyone knows of a good replacement IDE which either uses Studio's compiler back-end, or has GCC progressed to the point where it's usable for production code?

** edit ** or should I bin my ageing VS 6.0 and get with the new groove and purchase .NET? Can I code using .NET without my apps requiring the .NET framework? Is .NET leaps and bounds better than 6.0?

Yeah you can program C++ and C apps without having to use the Net framework. Its only for C# and other things like that you have to use .Net Framework. GCC is progressing quite nicely. I would think that its at a point where its stable enough to be used for commercial code. Well version 3.3 is anyways, I dont know about 4.0 For IDE's codeblocks and eclipse look fairly nice, codeblocks can use your VC6 compiler or use GCC and eclipse naturally uses GCC. Visual Studio's interface is a little intimidating, but after a few weeks you'll get used to it and begin flying through the interface ;)

Thanks Ledo. I'll take a look at codeblocks before I start thinking about GCC. C++ development for Windows really seems geared around Microsoft's compiler. Use of GCC (or Codewarrior) seems to introduce problems (different sets of includes, various open-sourced releases compatible only with VS unless sweeping source changes are made).

** EDIT: Codeblocks works with (amongst other things) the Visual Studio .NET 2003 toolkit which is a free distribution of the core components of .NET 2003 (compiler, linker, includes). Very handy.

** Further EDIT: Codeblocks + Visual Studio .NET 2003 toolkit is an excellent development environment. has a few stability problems, but Codeblocks is still being worked on and I'm sure they'll fix the big bugs before a it comes out of beta (it's at release candidate stage).

As a bonus VS Studio .NET 2003 seems to initialise quicker than 05....