Well, basically you have not much options here. Regarding to your choice (MS Visual Studio) they are:
- MFC/C++ - not convinient at all, I can say it's a small pain in the ass. But a lot of program were written exactly with a help of MFC library. It's a canonical way :)
- Windows Forms/C++ - actually it's not usial C++, but C++/CLI. Not so much different, but has a few things to note. You can take a look at C++/CLI Cheat Sheet for example. Not usial, but, hey, you can use Windows Forms!
- Windows Forms/C# - as for me, this combination is almost perfect. Nothing to add.
- WPF/C# - even much more interesting. Any control can be modified in any way, but you have to know a lot of tricks and howtos to make all things work. In that case I highly suggest to use WPF Toolkit. Anyway, you can find a lot of cool stuff for WPF (I even made once a mini-SCADA with a bunch of UI elements related to industrial stuff (valve, pumps, etc.)). Do not forget, you can do animation as well. It is pretty easy.
- Qt addon for MSVS/C++ - the last but not the least option. All UI you make in Qt Quick - GUI IDE. Also you have a greatiest slot/signal interaction model (which was improved in Qt5.0).
My choise now is definitely Qt. It's crossplatform, btw.