Want to learn Windows Programming,some suggestions?

Question

Someone told me to use MFC,but it seems that MFC will be dead,although its not already... so if i want to learn windows programming now, which one should i choose? thx.

Answer 1

I encourage you to learn C#, personally is one of the best programming languages for windows nowadays (personal opinion)

Answer 2

If you really want to learn windows programming, start with Petzold's Programming Windows book. You'll get a good understanding of how Windows actually works, which is invaluable when dealing with the more abstracted frameworks.

Then skip over to Windows Forms or WPF. MFC isn't worth the headache.

Answer 3

If you are going to program at the windows api level, you would be better off using something like Qt.

Answer 4

learn plain win32 API not waste your time on MFC ... that is my opinion

Answer 5

Hey,

Depends on the type of application you want to create? The latest forms-based programming is WPF... that is the latest and greatest, but Windows Forms programming is also an option too (there's a lot leveraged in this still).

HTH.

Answer 6

I'm with Andres on this one, learn C#.

Additionally you might consider working with java some. There is a huge knowledge base there and in my experience it and C# cross over a lot in syntax and form.

If you are looking for problems consider Project Euler or Programming Praxis

Answer 7

If you want to go to the raw Win32API (Which I think you will learn the most and a must-have for your bookshelf)... Charles Petzold's Bible is a must-have... MFC, ATL, C# Winforms are all basically wrappers for the true API architecture using nice properties/events....

Answer 8

Depends, like everything in the IT world depends of what you need.

But C# or Java is a good start!.

Answer 9

If your goal is to learn the Windows API, MFC isn't a bad place to start. It's a really thin wrapper around the API, nearly transparent in most cases. Perhaps the biggest difference is in the message handling mechanism. In MFC you use macros to generate a table of message handling functions, and many messages get rerouted automatically from parent to child or vice versa. In a raw API program you'll typically see a message loop with a huge switch statement, and it all gets handled in one place.

Answer 10

WPF or WinForms with C#. With WPF you can create very flexible GUIs, WinForms is more traditional. Try Expression Blend for creating GUI (WPF) and Visual Studio for coding :)

Answer 11

Well it depends on what you want to do. Are you new to programming in general? If so then I would suggest picking up a good programming book or going to a college and enrolling in a CS degree program.

If you already know how to program and just want to write windows programs you have several options. Which one you pick depends on what you want to do and who your target audience is.

Win32 API - The lowest level you can get. It's OLD OLD OLD school C code, but you can write small fast good looking programs. You have to do pretty much everything yourself. The Win32 API is pretty complicated and you have to know the ins and outs to write the best code possible.

MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) - Takes the Win32 API and encapsulates it in C++ classes. It's again OLD OLD school but has recently been upgraded from MS with the new 2008 feature pack so it's far from dead.

.NET (C#, VB) - The brand spanking new stuff from MS. It's incredibly easy to write code and create programs. However it does hide all the lower level stuff from you so you just write C# or whatever and it always works.

And of course you can always write in Delphi, Qt, WxWidgets but these are simply wrappers for the win32 API.

As far as my personal choice goes it depends on what I'm doing. At my job I write C# because the hardware/software is under my control. I know what version of the framework is going to be installed, how much RAM, hard disk space, etc. For my own projects I create I almost always use MFC. It hides the nastiness of the Win32 API and gives me C++ power. Would I prefer to make everything .net, absolutely but I've found not a lot of people have the .net framework installed so I was severely limiting my user base.