Abstract: Many colleges and universities have a C++ programming course. Some take advantage of the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) provided by Visual C++ (or Visual Studio) to teach students Windows form application programming. They frequently focus the teaching on how to use IDE to build the application with minimum or no hand coding involved. However, students need hand-coding experience to truly understand the structure of Windows-based applications. In this paper, the author advocates the necessity to teach Windows form application programming with hand coding, without the use of IDE. The author presents several important topics that are frequently not discussed and some programming skills students do not learn in an IDE-based C++ programming course.