Well my life with concentrated focus on c++ has come to an end.
What I have learned from my studies:
1. c++ is actually a great language, its initial shortcomings come from C.
2. the Standard Template Library along with Boost really bring incredible power to c++
3. Console apps are pretty cross platform code from os to os. GUI apps are not!
4. Besides doing tutorials and class work online, code wise only using Irrlicht and SFML worked as you would expect.
5. Visual Studio while awesome and not its fault per se, but Microsoft drove me nuts. I found out this one long course
I did which eventually lead to creating a great particle engine... well once I took the executable over to another machine... it would not run.
even though I compiled and developed as a win32 app. It just wouldn't run, not giving any useful help on what was needed etc.

Code Blocks (the current official stable version along with mingw32 that comes bundled with it) on the otherhand is great and code compiled with it, works great no matter which windows OS I run it on.

Finally if you looked at your program uninstall control panel in Windows(well if you install alot of games as I do), you will probably find many different Microsoft C++ redistributables. This drives me crazy to see those. It is like old Visual Basic programs that were executables but needed a matching runtime... now they made c++ like that is unforgivable if you ask me

But as I wrote, if you use Code Blocks you don't have that problem.

I don't see the need to program in c++ anymore.

I think Delphi / Lazarus(freepascal) makes one more productive with all the power of c++ any hobbyist would need.
The last few years, not counting things like the Unity and UDK game engines, I found that thinBasic and Lazarus were the two languages I developed things in the quickest and funnest manner.

Now to relearn all I forgot in thinBasic.