Ivor Horton's Beginning Visual C++ 2012

WRITING C++ APPLICATIONS

You have tremendous flexibility in the types of applications and program components that you can develop with Visual C++. Applications that you can develop fall into two broad categories: desktop applications and Windows 8 apps. Desktop applications are the applications that you know and love; they have an application window that typically has a menu bar and a toolbar and frequently a status bar at the bottom of the application window. This book focuses primarily on desktop applications.

Windows 8 apps are different from desktop applications. They have a user interface that is completely different from desktop applications. The focus is on the content where the user interacts directly with the data, rather than interacting with controls such as menu items and toolbar buttons.

Once you have learned C++, this book concentrates on using the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) with C++ for building desktop applications. The application programming interface (API) for Windows desktop applications is referred to as Win32. Win32 has a long history and was developed long before the object-oriented programming paradigm emerged, so it has none of the object-oriented characteristics that would be expected if it were written today. The MFC consists of a set of C++ classes that encapsulate the Win32 API for user interface creation and control and greatly eases the process of program development. You are not obliged to use the MFC, though. If you want the ultimate in ...