Character Is What You Are In the Dark

The past few days have been adventures in to the Win32 API.  After all the elegance of playing with the STL and creating classes, I have gone back to fairly basic C style coding.  Not only that, C-style coding with Microsoft style tags and means.  I can see the various Visual Basic influences as well as some other old school language methods. 

Now to be fair, this API has been around for over 15 years.  So it does pre-date the formalization of C++ and it is based on the early DOS methods of doing things.  The API is easier to deal with than pure C.  I do get more useful functions like WriteFile() and CreateFile() instead of write() and creat().  So when I was looking around for good resource books on the topic, the one that everyone mentions is Programing Windows by Charles Petzold.  The book was last updated in 1998.  Normally I am very leery of technical books over 5 years old, but it seems that the API has not changed too much since then.  What little has been added is documented well enough on the MSDN website.

It is the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFCs) that are the "object-oriented" programing tools for windows, and that is what brings you back up to C++.  (Or Visual Basic and C#)

At this point, I got what I needed from the tutorial, that is enough information to read the road maps and signs for playing with DirectX.  Now I am no longer befuddled by LPTSTR or HWND.  I can see what they are obfuscating.