My question is are there an example that use forms? The example I found all seem to be console applications and while they are helpful, I really want my students to start programming with forms (initially at least).

Hello, there's no boost gui library yet, there's one under construction but I don't know its status, you might want to check it out. In all fairness, there are portable gui libraries that are mature and good out there, like Qt, wxwidgets or GTK (Qt being my favorite). That being said, I'm not sure making your students learn gui programming first is a very good idea. There's already way enough to learn with simple console applications, algorithms and data structure comes to mind. Boost can help you there a lot with its generic and portable approach, stuffs like boost::bind or boost::shared_ptr are a must have in your c++ toolkit imho. Philippe