Windows Programming Options

To illustrate the various techniques of Windows programming, this book has lots of sample programs. These programs are written in C and use the native Windows APIs. I think of this approach as “classical” Windows programming. It is how we wrote programs for Windows 1.0 in 1985, and it remains a valid way of programming for Windows today.

APIs and Memory Models

To a programmer, an operating system is defined by its API. An API encompasses all the function calls that an application program can make of an operating system, as well as definitions of associated data types and structures. In Windows, the API also implies a particular program architecture that we’ll explore in the chapters ahead.

Generally, the Windows API has ...

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