Programming Windows: Windows Application Basics (Premium)

The benefits of a graphical user interface (GUI) like Windows are well understood today, but this was a hotly contested topic in the mid-1980s. “Real” computers didn’t need no stinkin’ mouse or pretty graphics, critics alleged at the time. But Bill Gates, like Steve Jobs, correctly saw the future for what it was. (Indeed, Jobs was so blown away by the GUI work he saw at Xerox Parc that he completely missed their other innovations in object orientation and networking.) And the PC would inevitably move from the command line environment provided by MS-DOS towards the GUI provided by Windows.

That transition would take several years and several versions of Windows. But whether it was an operating environment on top of MS-DOS, a “thing on a thing,” as it was called in the early days, or a cohesive operating system in its own right, as it is now, Windows has always provided the same basic advantages to both users and application developers: A consistent user experience for all applications, task-switching between multiple running applications, inter-application data exchange capabilities, and device independent access to hardware peripherals like printers and graphics cards.

For developers, in particular, using Windows meant that they never had to create their own user interfaces from scratch; everything from the application windows themselves to the buttons, text boxes, scroll bars, and other objects that appear within them were supplied by Windows. These objects were consistent on all Windows applications, so developers could create their own solutions that looked at home next to the applications that Microsoft included in Windows and worked similarly.

This was all wonderful---still is---but Windows struggled in other areas. It required years of refinement and steady hardware improvements before it was efficient for most users. It was large and resource hungry, and while early versions could run on an 8086-based PC with two floppy drives and just 320 KB of RAM, an 80286 tied to an expensive hard drive and 640 KB or more of RAM was far more realistic.

For the budding Windows application developer, however, Windows was even more challenging.

“The real problem with Windows is that it’s hard to write programs for,” Byte’s Jerry Pournelle sagely and correctly noted in the March 1989 issue of that publication.

He was right. In those years, developers needed Microsoft C or another compatible C compiler plus Microsoft’s Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) and a strong command of the C programming language. They also needed to figure out this crazy new Windows API that Microsoft created. And while the Windows SDK came with a reference guide to the roughly 450 functions that developers could use, it contained virtually no tutorials.

Help would come eventually in the form of Charles Petzold’s classic book Programming Windows. But the first edition of Programming Windows wasn’t published until 1988, by...