Welcome

Leech the tutorial and all sources and stuff

March 2010 update:

This tutorial is old. Very old. Revision would probably do it good. It was written as a "here's windows programming for you dos programming people" kind of thing.

Since there's rather few dos programmers out there looking to try out this new windows thing, it's rather outdated. Still, the contents are (more or less) valid after all these years.

Jan 1999 update:

After writing this tutorial I've found that there is at least one bug somewhere in the examples, but I'll leave that as an excersize for the reader :)

The tutorial was written before I laid my hands on Visual C, and thus the owners of VC6 might wonder where they can find some help file or other. Instead of using the old windows help system, microsoft uses a html-ish help system in VC6 with better find system etc. Learn to use it. I wonder why the whole help package (2 cds) didn't include any ansi C library helps..

Some people have been asking me to write more tutorials, like windows tricks and directx.. after reading some "tutorials" out there (where "lesson" is just a pile of non-commented code) I can see why. I might write a directx tut someday if I can find the time.

Welcome to Sol's Windows coding tutorials. These tutorials are built for a generic democoder in mind, by a person with heavy demo coding background.

Like most coding tutorials, this is a pile or more or less disorganized mess, which is generally better than nothing, and may have some misleading information. That's why I didn't say windows programming tutorial.

So, to be exact, this tutorial is built for a democoder, who's comfortable with C, has some windows-capable C compiler installed with win95 and win32 SDK installed as well.

This tutorial is NOT about C++, WinG, 16-bit windows, MFC, DirectX, hacking windows, or any things like that. This is just a tutorial to build a working win32 program.

I started coding windows stuff by first setting a target for myself. I wanted a little window that will show a scope of sound sampled by windows, so that I could see what some midis and stuff look like. I read asphynxia windows tutorials, and on that base started coding and finding out stuff. I did make that program, and it's running currently - but it only works with gravis ultrasound PnP cards! (This is due to the fact that GUS PnP is, as far as I know, the only sound card that supports multiple wave clients; with all others running the program reserves the sound card and thus no sound can be played for it to record).

Ever since I've read some 5 different windows programming manuals, only to find out that I had found stuff out by myself quite well.

So, if you're like me, you'll scan through these tutorials and then go your own way finding out stuff. If not, follow the tutorial.. the first chapter doesn't have any code. I'll first have to explain some background.

Journey onwards