Well, you can't :)) By which I mean you can't do graphic application in C in Visual Studio as you could do in Turbo C unless you are gonna use some external graphic library. But, most of them are written in C++ as far as I know, so you are probably going to have to "upgrade" your skills.

Or, if you'd like to do it more in line with "standard" way of programming in Visual Studio, I'd recommend starting learning C# and .NET - there are a lot of very impressive graphic capabilities there.

Be more specific: which graphic library do you plan to use?

Or what kind of graphics functionality you need?

What do you mean by "graphics programming"? You mean using a widget toolkit for implementing widget-based user interface with buttons, text-fields, radio-boxes, dialog boxes, etc? If so, you need to pick one of the toolkits that are available for C/C++. This should get you started: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_widget_toolkits

Or do you mean actually graphics programming? OpenGL libraries have their bindings directly in C, so you can program your graphics pipeline in C and Visual Studio 2012 exactly the same way as you would do in any other environment.

http://www.opengl.org/about/#5

ps. Visual Studio 2012 can be used for developing in both, C and C++.

The graphics library used in Turbo C++ was called BGI (Borland Graphics Interface). There are a few "clones" of the library for Visual C++, MinGW, and other compilers, the most popular called WinBGI, I think. Do a google search for "WinBGI for Visual C++" and you should be able to find what you need.

Here's the link:

http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~main/bgi/visual/

Good luck!

Alfonso Alba is right, I used it a lot in 199 and whatever :)

You should build all the graphics elements with lines, circles, arcs and pixels. And must use the mouse interruption to get it movement and action. In fact you can make all that you want, with a restricted pallet of colors, but it works!

Just for the record, the BGI is very old and I would only recommend it for compatibility reasons; for example, if you have some old Turbo C++ code you'd like to run in a modern OS, or if you're very proficient with BGI and don't have time to learn a new library. For developing a new application from scratch, I'd recommend using one of the various modern multiplatform graphics libraries that are being constantly updated. Personally, I use OpenCV. It does anything the BGI does, and much more, much better. The basic drawing functions (lines, circles, etc) are just as easy to use as the ones in BGI, but it also has a ton of image processing functions that BGI lacks.

I like to use Qt for this task. This is not restricted to using Visual Studio, but can be used wherever you are programming C++ (it's even independent of the operating system). Qt provides a lot more than just GUI components. This makes it a little harder at first to get acquainted with this framework.

If you are used to be able to drag-and-drop the GUI you will have the Qt Designer for this task. You can also use QML which is a markup language to describe the GUI. In contrast to many other toolkits the advantage is that this is all part of the original Qt distribution. (I once had a look at wxWidgets and there are only independent GUI editors not entirely supported by wxWidgets.)

Personally. Qt is by far the best lib for graphics (GUI) prog and is transferable to any C++ IDE. Learning curve is a bit steep, but it is much more than just a GUI toolkit. Linking this with OpenGL/OSG and OpenCV makes it very useful for 3D graphics applications and systems. Much of the boring boilerplate code it done for you allowing you to get on with the bits that are really interesting.

The alternative, if you just want a transferable GUI lib is, for me, to consider using either TCL/TK within a C++ application framework, or using Java for your framework (high level OO and interface) with JNI C++ to support the perf/computationally interesting bits.

I agree with "Rob Aspin" QT is a very good choice.

I need to point, that I agree with many people, that QT is a best choice.

In addition I can recomend to use SFML library (http://www.sfml-dev.org/). I had used it in my course of C++ programming. It is a high level layer to OpenGL functions.

You can try as well SDL library. It brought me back to the times I was able to draw a line on the screen...

I can approve of the BLG (if now old and unsupported), the OpenGL quick bindings (problems if you want to draw text ouf of the box) and QT ( very good but lots to learn).

For the sake of completeness you might want to try lib cinder (http://libcinder.org ) its a very simple C++ interface designed for (digital) artists so assuming you only want drawing and basic interaction (mouse/multitouch but no GUI widgets). It does most of what you want. I tend to reach for Cinder and openFrameworks (http://openframeworks.cc) if there is something quick and graphical i want to knock together very quicky. It's also cross platform and works on iPads too.

Sir "Alfonso Alba" , I am using Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate . I am only finding for 2010 and earlier versions of visual studio . :(

Hi Alfonso, I use the wxWidgets library (C++) that provides many classes for graphics (and non graphics) stuff. It's open source and multi-platform. I use it with Visual studio. You may have a look of what kind of image / video software can be developed with it with this short demo (we did this editing software in our lab):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5kcBU0haACI

Alfonso gave a good answers. However, I agree with Rob and Simon. Qt is a good choice if VS is not compulsory.

Agreed QT is good, is a kind of script language which can do a lot of nice things.

@Mauricio: Qt is a feature rich C++ library. I would not compare it to a scripting language. But, it is possible to write a really tiny C++ program and write the major parts of the software in Javascript. Or there is also QML which is a lot like CSS mixed with some Javascript. So, there are ways to use scripting languages in Qt (and they are part of the original package). But first of all, Qt is a true C++ library.

@Pascal: I prefer Qt over wxWidgets. I have seen software written with wxWidgets and I don't like the ways things are done there. I think it is too complicated to connect events, e.g. mouse click and keyboard input, to actions. Since their approach is copied from Microsoft's libraries it is as complicated as Microsoft Windows programming. Qt's signal/slot concept is a lot more elegant and easier to use. The only advantage of wxWidgets over Qt that I can see is the license. They explicitely state that you can do whatever you want with the library as long as you don't change it. Since Qt is under the LGPL 2.1 static linking is not allowed and nobody definitely knows if dynamic linking is sufficient.

Sorry @Simon I made a mistake, I mistook the QT with TCL / TK that I used to use on linux in a couple of year ago.QT is diferent is a library for C++, as you told, that can also used to develope graphical UI on linux.