December 2000
Intermediate to advanced
1280 pages
28h 56m
English
Content preview from Windows Graphics Programming Win32 GDI and DirectDraw®Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 3. GDI/DirectDraw Internal Data Structures
The Windows API often claims to be object based, which is close to, but not exactly the same as, object oriented. To use the Win32 API, you often have to create objects of some kind, manipulate them through some functions, and then finally destroy them. When you create an object, the operating system is completely managing the internal representation of the object, and you as a programmer only see a handle.
GDI uses dozens of different kinds of objects, device contexts, logical pens, logical brushes, logical fonts, logical palettes, device-independent bitmaps, DIB sections, etc. For all of them, you only see a handle, a mysterious handle which you can't do anything about except pass it back to ...