Ivor Horton's Beginning Visual C++ 2012

LEARNING DESKTOP APPLICATIONS PROGRAMMING

There are always two basic aspects to interactive desktop applications executing under Windows: You need code to create the graphical user interface (GUI) with which the user interacts, and you need code to process these interactions to provide the functionality of the application. Visual C++ provides you with a great deal of assistance in both aspects. As you’ll see later in this chapter, you can create a working Windows program with a GUI without writing any code at all. All the basic code to create the GUI can be generated automatically by Visual C++. Of course, it’s essential to understand how this automatically generated code works because you need to extend and modify it to make the application do what you want. To do that you need a comprehensive understanding of C++.

For this reason you’ll first learn C++ without getting involved in Windows programming considerations. After you’re comfortable with C++ you’ll learn how to develop fully fledged Windows applications. This means that while you are learning C++, you’ll be working with programs that involve only command line input and output. By sticking to this rather limited input and output capability, you’ll be able to concentrate on the specifics of how the C++ language works and avoid the inevitable complications involved in GUI building and control. Once you are comfortable with C++ you’ll find that it’s an easy and natural progression to applying C++ to the development of Windows ...