I’m still learning how to program for Windows in C++ using the Win32 API, and I’m writing more of my impressions — remember that I’ve worked with Linux for the past 12 years, and this all is practically new for me.
- Visual Studio is not a bad IDE, but it is not excellent either (at least for C++). That, or I have been spoilt by Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA and their excellent support for refactoring (at least for Java). IDEA has such a powerful autocompletion, I have written complete modules without writing a method or variable name in full. In Visual Studio, OTOH, IntelliSense stops working all the time. Are you initializing a variable in the definition? It stops working. Have you got a syntax error 50 lines up? It stops working. Are you using C++ templates? It stops working. I don’t know why it stops working so much, when it doesn’t even try to figure out whether you want to input a type or a method or a variable name.
- It is hard work embedding Internet Explorer in an application when you aren’t using MFC or Visual Basic or C# or one of those frameworks that give you a “WebBrowser” class in which all the work is already done. Not knowing anything about OLE/COM/ActiveX didn’t help, of course. I have to thank Jeff Glatt for his article, “Embed an HTML control in your own window using plain C” (and his “COM in plain C” series), and the authors of wxCode’s IEHtmlWin component (once again, Free Software comes to the rescue!). Reading them helped me to understand how it works. Now when I go read the documentation on MSDN, it makes sense!.
- Talking about MSDN, the quality of the documentation varies. At some points it is very comprehensive and includes tutorials and guides and everything, and can be read as an introductory book. However, at other points it already assumes you know how to do what you want to learn, and only includes a very broad overview and reference information. Not that the documentation in most Linux or free/open source projects is much better in general, mind you…
- Update: I also want to correct my previous assertion that there was few documentation and my assumption that they kept it scarce on purpose for book publishers’ sakes. It turns out there is plenty of documentation (see the point above), only that I didn’t know how to find it, as it wasn’t in the Express Edition help files. I think. Anyway, it’s all online on MSDN.