learn to program using the windows api

It’s just a little program for myself to help speed up answering tech support questions at work. It contains a bunch of buttons that can be assigned to various text files, and clicking one will copy the text file to the clipboard. This is very useful for me because I answer the same 5 questions over and over, so now I just click on the right button and paste it into my response. There’s a few improvements I can make (like perhaps having it talk to Outlook and actually paste itself) but I’m pretty pleased about my success, especially since I wrote it in plain old native C.

• Learning what all those #defined data types mean
• Remembering/being able to find out what the API function you need is, and then how to get the handles for the things you need to pass it

• When you supply bad data to an API call, it doesn’t crash. Coming from working on the BlackBerry this is amazing.

I’m working on this at the moment. The Win32 API is way better than the BlackBerry one, for sure.

It seems very hard to not use an IDE for building Windows applications, which in general goes against my philosophies. It also bothers me that Visual Studio tries so hard to hide its support for C. Anyway, some stuff is kind of weird, and there’s like 400k of #defined constants to work with in windows.h and included files, but I guess that’s what google’s for, and for the most part things seem pretty reasonable.