What is the quickest path to writing a lightweight GUI program on Windows?

What about a WSH script? It won't be an exe, right, but to ask for a folder I don't see the need for an exe file, much less a 30Mb one...

A 1Kb script, save it as whatever name you like with vbs extension and run it. This, in case it's not clear, asks you for a folder name and then runs calc.exe from the system32 subdirectory. You can of course do a lot better than this in 2 or 4 Kb.

Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
win = InputBox("Please type your Windows folder location.")
If Right(win,1) <> "\" Then
  win = win & "\"
End If
WshShell.Run win & "system32\calc.exe"

To add a Folder Browser dialog instead of an InputBox, check this out.

Clear benefits are:

• Simplicity (well, VB is ugly, but you can use JScript if you prefer), no need to compile it!
• Compatibility, works on every windows machine I have available (from 98 onwards)

Quickest way on Windows for a lightweight and fast GUI? One word.. Delphi! It lacks the 64 bit support for now but then FreePascal would come to the rescue.

I'd use .NET and WinForms. The idea of scripted solution is appealing, but in practice I often find you end up jumping through hoops to do anything beyond the basic case and still don't have the flexibility to do everything you want.