Programming Windows®, Fifth Edition

Your First Windows Program

Now it’s time to do some coding. Let’s begin by looking at a very short Windows program and, for comparison, a short character-mode program. These will help us get oriented in using the development environment and going through the mechanics of creating and compiling a program.

A Character-Mode Model

A favorite book among programmers is The C Programming Language (Prentice Hall, 1978 and 1988) by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie, affectionately referred to as K&R. Chapter 1 of this book begins with a C program that displays the words “hello, world.”

Here’s the program as it appeared on Aspects of Windows of the first edition of The C Programming Language:

main ()
{
     printf ("hello, world\n") ;
}

Yes, once upon a time ...