You can use C++ code to instantiate and arrange widgets, but this soon becomes tedious. The Glade application allows you to layout widgets on screen and then save an XML description of the arrangement. Your application can then use the libglademm API to load that XML file at runtime and obtain a pointer to specifically named widget instances.

This lets you just write code to respond to user interaction and to do actual processing - the interesting stuff that makes your application special.

Glib::RefPtr<Gnome::Glade::Xml> refXml = Gnome::Glade::Xml::create("basic.glade");



Gtk::Dialog* pDialog = 0;

refXml->get_widget("DialogBasic", pDialog);