Shifting from .NET to Win32 development

Question

I have been a .NET developer since I started coding. I would like to learn Win32 programming. Need advice on where to start. What are the best resources /books for learining Win32 programming. I know a bit 'college C++'.

Answer 1

Hands down, best book for Win32 programming is Charles Petzold's book "Programming Windows". Amazon link here.

Answer 2

If you are interested in UI development, the best book for direct Win32 development in C or C++ (no MFC) is Programming Windows by Charles Petzold

For other sorts of Win32 development, such as threading, memory, DLL's, etc., Windows via C/C++ by Jeffrey Richter is a great book.

For general Windows architecture, Windows Internals by David Solomon and Mark Russinovich is a great resource.

Answer 3

If you're interested in learning C++ have a look around the site, there's loads of questions similar to yours: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/155762/best-c-resource

If you want to program windows I'd stick with .net, win32 and MFC are hard work.

Answer 4

While you're at it, pick up this book:

C++ Pointers and Dynamic Memory Management

It's old (circa 1995) but it's one of the best books to demystify pointers. If you ever found yourself blindly adding *'s or &'s to get your code to compile you probably need to read this.