I found this to be useful, make a Win32 GUI in the old-school 90s way using MingW so you don't even have to use any Microsoft tools. It has the advantage that nothing has to be installed on the target PC except your application.

https://www.transmissionzero.co.uk/computing/win32-apps-with...

I used it to make an application that downloads files over a serial port from an OptiCon bar-code scanner:

https://github.com/jhallen/cartscan

Coming from UNIX, the biggest annoyance was Microsoft's use of wide character strings.