Ivor Horton's Beginning Visual C++ 2012

WINDOWS PROGRAMMING BASICS

The Windows API is referred to as WinAPI or Win32, the latter being a slightly dated term since the availability of 64-bit versions of Windows. When you are developing an application with the Windows API, you are writing code at a relatively low level throughout — all the elements that make up the GUI for your application must be created programmatically by calling operating system functions. With MFC applications you are using a set of standard classes that insulate you from the Windows API and make coding much easier. There’s also some help with GUI creation in that you can assemble controls on a dialog form graphically and just program the interactions with the user; however, you are still involved in a lot of coding.

Using the Windows API directly is the most laborious method for developing an application so I won’t go into this in detail. However, you will put together a basic Windows API application so you’ll have an opportunity to understand the mechanism that all Windows applications use under the covers to work with the operating system. Of course, it also is possible to develop applications in C++ that do not require the Windows operating system, and games sometimes take this approach. Many games use DirectX, which is a Windows specific graphics library. Although this is an interesting topic, it would require a whole book to do it justice, so I won’t pursue it further.

Before getting to the examples I’ll review the terminology that is used to ...