wxWidgets 3.0 - new features and functions, additions and replacing deprecated ones

Question

I have a question for developers who use wxWidgets.

I have just started learning wxWidgets 3.0, without any prior experience with GUI programming . After just a little searching and asking, I have found out that the latest version includes many new very useful features and functions, some of them replacing deprecated ones. The one most often mentioned new function is Bind(), that replaces Connect() and event tables.

I am following this tutorial and this tutorial, as well as a few simple samples from library documentation. Since these tutorials and the samples are mostly from previous versions, they mostly don't include the newest changes / additions in wxWidgets 3.0 .

I would like to know... what are the most prominent new functions and features, that have been introduced with wxWidgets 3.0, that a newcomer to wxWidgets should definitely learn about ? Thank you.

Answer 1

You have already found out about Bind() which is important as you should replace any appearance of Connect() in the old examples or tutorials with it -- and also seriously consider replacing the static event tables with it as well.

Another thing important from this point of view are Unicode changes: many pre-3.0 posts and examples use wxT() (or _T(), which is exactly the same thing), but it's not needed at all with wxWidgets 3.0. You should also ignore any discussions of Unicode vs ANSI builds as there is only one build of wxWidgets 3.0, compatible with both Unicode and ANSI builds of the previous versions.

Something that is not new in 3.0 but still doesn't seem to be widely known is wxSizerFlags using which makes the code using sizers much more readable. You still need to understand how the sizers work however (this hasn't changed) and you may still choose to use XRC instead of writing this code in C++ at all (this isn't new neither).

Other than that there are a lot of additions in 3.0 (e.g. web view, ribbon and property grid libraries), but no other really important breaking changes.