Prompting a user with an input box? [C++]

If you are using Visual C++ Express there are a number of free resource editors that can be used to create dialogs. ResEdit is one of the better ones I've found.

You need to create a dialog resource in a .RC file that you add to your project.

Then, It is a very simple case of calling DialogBox - which will load the dialog box from your resource file and place it on the screen. The passed in DialogProc will be called with a number of notifications. Typically you would want to return FALSE for everything, but handle WM_INITDIALOG as a place to initialize the edit control with text, and WM_COMMAND will be sent when a button is clicked.

Microsoft doesn't consider your use case to be common enough to optimize for, as with MessageBox. They expect you to lay out a dialog with many controls on it, perhaps with some complex interaction with the controls, and only respond once the dialog is fully filled in. What you're asking for is just the simplified version of that.

The resource editor is the easiest way to create a dialog, but that's not included in the free Express version of Visual Studio. You would design the dialog with a text control for the prompt and an edit control for the user to fill in. You present the dialog with the DialogBox Windows function, and it returns when the user hits the OK button or the X in the corner of the dialog. Microsoft has some documentation for it here.

There are a few platforms available that try to make the process easier, such as MFC, WTL, Qt, and wx, but this is how you'd do it with the pure Windows API.

There is nothing like that for pure C++. Basically what you're trying to do can only be achieved by using an API call to the OS or by using some GUI library like Qt (which I recommend cause it's waaaaay easier then calling native APIs and it's also multi-platform)

Using Qt you can show an input dialog pretty much the same way you do it on java:

bool ok;
QString text = QInputDialog::getText(
        "MyApp 3000", "Enter your name:", QLineEdit::Normal,
        QString::null, &ok, this );
if ( ok && !text.isEmpty() ) {
    // user entered something and pressed OK
} else {
    // user entered nothing or pressed Cancel
}

You can download the Qt library here: qt.nokia.com/products/developer-tools/