I had a miserable holiday season. I was busy trying the Rip Van Winkle approach to learning programming, and not accomplishing much. The further I got in to Petzold, the more the behavior of programs diverged from what was described in the text. The programs would compile….but they wouldn’t work. The C language, the compilers (Visual Developer) and Windows itself have all changed since 1999, and the preconditions and and postconditions for Windows function calls that worked in the original, and those that apply now have changed in ways that I don’t have the resources to follow. And that’s if I haven’t committed any typos in entering the programs.

Although many beginning programmer’s texts start with a command-line approach, they don’t facilitate a transition to the Windows environment. I’ve finally found one that does: “Introduction to Windows and Graphics Programming With Visual C++”. by Roger Mayne. This looks like the bridge I have been looking for.

We’ll see how this goes.

Like the old Johnny Cash song. My attempts to work through Petzold are hitting snags, because there have been changes to Windows since he wrote the book, and the programs as written don’t work anymore. I don’t have an instructor or a decent guide to the complexities. I have finished the first eight chapters, about a quarter of the way through the book, which I still think is respectable progress, although I had hoped for more.

I’ve been concentrating on getting my computer programming moving, still concentrating on the early chapters of Windows Programming. I’ve been spreading my efforts out over the first few chapters, since typing programs in is a boring activity and I like to shift my focus to create a little variety. I’m almost through the chapter on text input, well into the chapter on the mouse, and almost through the chapter on the timer. There’s a bug in the program that’s supposed to draw dots of an analog clock face, and I can’t quite figure it out. Also, I’ve found that Visual Studio 2015 is finicky and unforgiving about creating resources (*.rc files, for those in the know), and has different behavior than the earlier version Petzold used in his book, so the description in the book doesn’t quite match. Once I’ve reached the point where my programs can actually can read the keyboard, I will be in a position to begin integrating this with other textbooks.

I’ve also begun working on a Windows Version of a program I’ve been puttering about with for some time; the Sapience Knowledge Explorer. I had begun an old style Command line version and made considerable progress working through a couple of textbooks for examples when I set this aside. My intention is that by working through a Windows version, I can make it more commercial, or at least more useful.

So far it’s quite embryonic. It doesn’t do much besides ask if it’s OK to continue and displays a greeting message if not. But–it’s my own work, not copied or derived.

I’ve been away from attempts to program Windows for some 20 years, and it has almost, but not quite, entirely moved beyond me. I’ve mostly been copying in the sample programs, trying to get a handle on the most basic concepts of input and output. As before, I note that things that were easy in the console approach are much harder in Windows, and thing that were hard in the console approach are much easier in Windows. So far, I’m still in the “Basics” part of the book, but I’ve gotten sample programs in the first 10 chapters (after some debugging due to typos) to compile and run. I can’t say that I entirely understand what I’m doing, and I’m not yet doing much original programming, but I am making progress.