Introduction
Years back, when I decided I wanted to be a windows programmer and began
win32 programming, I didn't have an easy tutorial I could follow. I had to
trudge through reference books, API lists and code samples to figure out how
to do simple tasks. I have written this tutorial to help you get comfortable
with win32 programming and avoid many of the mistakes I made on my journey
there.
We will start developing a tiny Drawing program and improve upon it as we
move through the lessons. At the end of this series, not only will you have a
full fledged drawing application but I hope you will have learnt enough of the
basics of windows programming to feel right at home.
Audience
This tutorial is written for absolute beginners to windows programming. It
is not intended to be used as a reference and so does not cover every aspect
of windows programming. A basic understanding of the C programming language is
assumed.
Platform and compiler
These tutorials and examples should run on all compilers from VC++ to the
freely available gcc. The platform is windows from win95 and up. I am told
that the programs can be compiled and run on *nix systems with wine.
The examples in this tutorial have been tested on Dev-C++ and LCC-win32.
Both are free for non-commercial use. The next chapter guides you on setting
up your development environment. If you experience any difficulties on your
specific compiler, feel free to mail me.
Industry Trends
With the fall of hardware prices, ease of programming and increasing
competition, being able to deploy applications quickly have become a priority.
RAD tools like visual basic are preferred today. With .NET looking really
promising, is win32 really worth learning?
I would say, it really depends on what you want to do. A good understanding
of how win32 works will definitely help you write better programs with .NET
tools. System drivers and such will still be written in win32, and systems
with limited memory and limited computing power will definitely benefit from
the speed and low memory requirements of well written win32 programs.
Feedback
This is my first attempt at writing a tutorial. I may have forgotten to add
certain things and overlooked others as trivial. Comments/suggestions/flames
are always welcome at
pravinp [at] gmail.com. Your feedback will
help make this tutorial better and you might find yourself mentioned in the
credits part of this document.
Official Homepage
The official version of this tutorial can be found at
http://www.geocities.com/pravinparatey. Check here for the
latest changes and revisions to this document.
Mirroring, copyright and distribution
This document titled "Windows Programming Tutorial" is copyright ©
2002-2003, Pravin Paratey.
You are free to mirror and distribute this document in any form so long at
its contents are not altered and it is presented in its entirety with this
copyright notice intact.
