Scattered Notes : Win32

Win32 Programming - part 4: C++ runtime redistributable

mapo — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 12:41:00 GMT

If you develop Win32 application using Visual C++ 2005 you will probably also have to distribute the C++ runtime together with your application.

X86 – http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=32BC1BEE-A3F9-4C13-9C99-220B62A191EE&displaylang=en
X64 – http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=90548130-4468-4BBC-9673-D6ACABD5D13B&displaylang=en
IA64 – http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=526BF4A7-44E6-4A91-B328-A4594ADB70E5&displaylang=en

Win32 Programming - part 3: tools

mapo — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 14:55:00 GMT

Here I recap, for those that do not yet have them, what I believe necessary tools and documentation to approach Win32 programming:

Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition (download it localized in your preferred languare and also don't forget to download service pack 1 from the same page)

Microsoft Platform Software Development Kit (PSDK)

If you are using VC++ 2005 Express you should read this page on how to update the Win32 project template and on how to enable a few Win32 projects types making them available for use inside the IDE.

Win32 Programming - part 2: forums and newsgroups

mapo — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 12:12:00 GMT

In writing any non-trivial application, help from the community of developers if often fundamental. In my own dev projects I have been using various forums and discussion sites.
Following are links to what I think among the very best:

Microsoft Discussion Groups (web interface to Microsoft's public NNTP newsgroups)

MSDN Forums

Google Groups (web interface to a vast set of NNTP newgroups)

CodeGuru Forums
Dev Shed Forums
GameDev.Net Discussion Forums
Cprogramming.com Forums
C++ Home Forums
OSDev Forums

The above sites often deal with lots of different technologies and programming languages but what ties them all is that they all have vast forums dealing with C/C++ on the Windows platform. There are obviously other very good discussion sites dealing with other technologies (.NET languages, web technologies, various application servers, etc.) but I'm not listing them here.

Did I miss any good discussion board?

Win32 Programming - part 1: an introductory tutorial

mapo — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 14:39:00 GMT

Something I once enjoyed was developing small Windows applications starting from scratch, that is, coding everything in C or C++ using only the Win32 APIs. I'd like to dedicate a few of my blog's posts to what it means to write applications this way. For this first post, I'd like to direct you this well known Win32 API tutorial. You can read the tutorial online or download it for offline reading either in HTML format or in PDF format. The zip containing the HTML version of the tutorial also contains the source code for all the sample applications. The source code for all the samples can also be downloaded by itself here.