I find myself annoyed that Visual Studio comes with a fancy GUI interface designer and that it is only accessible to .NET applications and not even managed C++.
Is there any easy way to at least open up a C DLL type interface with unmanaged/foreign code?
Best Solution
Windows Forms is very much a part of the .NET framework and cannot be accessed (at least not in any practical sense) from unmanaged code. However, it is possible to call it from managed C++ (I don't know about designer support in Visual Studio itself, but managed C++ can definitely use the Windows Forms library).
You might want to look into other C++ GUI options, such as Qt, wxWidgets, or Gtkmm.