Audacity can be built with VS2010 (though the core developers have no intention of moving to MSVC 2010, due (a) to the ‘This is for evaluation purposes only’ MSVC 2010 Express splash screen and (b) bugs in MSVC 2010 Express that are not present in MSVC 2008 Express).
See here for a topic about building on VS2010: Success compiling Audacity with VS2010
See here for documentation about building/developing on Windows: Missing features - Audacity Support
Will do. Better still, stay in touch and let us know on the forum how you get on. This forum board would be as good as anywhere for such posts: General Audio Programming - Audacity Forum but if you have anything that you think would benefit the main Audacity distribution then this forum board may be better: Adding Features - Audacity Forum
Much of the “look” are due to WxWidgets, which in spite of its faults provides good cross-platform support (and is a lot less clunky than it used to be). Personally I quite like the way that it looks on Debian, though I’d not object at all to a more modern “skin” as long as that could be done without detracting from functionality.
well there’s a few million Audacity users that don’t agree with you. In fact we often receive feedback that Audacity is a lot easier to use than other multitrack editing software (even if they do look prettier).
Please feel free to make suggestions for how to improve the GUI. If you can include patches/source code along with your suggestion, all the better.
You may also be interested in this: Request: Skin - #7 by fractalorangejuice
“Theme” support has been temporarily dropped from Audacity as it was a bit buggy and underdeveloped, but it would be nice to see it come back - perhaps with your help?