Programming Windows: Another Quick Progress Report (Premium)

We’re now three months and over 50 articles into the Programming Windows series. Here’s another quick progress report.

As I noted in my first progress report, the series has come together much more quickly than I’d imagined it would when I finally resolved to scratch this itch. And it’s getting bigger and bigger all the time: After the first six weeks, I had published 23 articles. And now, after three months, I’ve published 51 articles (not counting the first progress report check-in). So there have been 28 articles since the previous update.

We’re not quite to what I consider to be the halfway point of the series. Basically, the first half deals with Windows in the pre-.NET world, and the second half is about Windows in the .NET world. I have four more articles planned for the first half of the series, though I will definitely be adding more over time as well. You can see them in the revised Table of Contents (TOC) below, but three are antitrust related and the other is about IIS, Visual InterDev, and FrontPage. Once those are completed, I will move into the .NET era.

As many have noted, this series has evolved into what is clearly a book, and we’ve had discussions at work about making that happen. Given the expected length, it may make sense to break it into two books (pre-.NET, .NET). If that does happen, I could imagine publishing the first book, which will contain additional material and hopefully some interviews, by the end of the year. And then tackling the second book in the first half of next year.

I like that it’s a book, and I hope that it’s interesting for you to see that happen in real-time. I had warned upfront that it wasn’t possible to write this thing in a truly linear or chronological fashion, that I would move in and out of topics and time frames, and that has happened even more frequently than expected. This, I know, is confusing to some, and there is a want or need for a more linear or chronological listing of the articles. The closest we can get to that is the TOC, which can never be truly chronological. Instead, it’s just organized by topics, in individual articles and in logical sections.

For now, that looks like so.

The World Before Windows

Introduction

A Timeline

Pre-History

In the Beginning

Wintel

IBM Defends the Original PC

Windows API

Hello, World

Windows Application Basics

Hello, Windows

Windows API Wrap-Up

BASIC

Microsoft Basic

Hello, Microsoft Basic

BASIC Inventors Take on Gates, Microsoft

Visual Basic Beginnings

Hello, Visual Basic

Visual Basic Takes Over the World

Visual Basic to the Future

NT

Microsoft OS/2

NT

The Windows NT Death March

NT Everywhere

Cairo, a Road Not Taken

More Roads Not Taken

C++ and MFC

Object-Oriented Programming

Hello, C++

Hello, MFC

Microsoft Foundation Class Library

Components

Clipboard and DDE

Hello, DDE

OLE

Hello, OLE 2.0

COM

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