Programming Windows: The .NET Era (Premium)

After a two-year wait, I’m happy to announce that I’m returning to my Programming Windows series and will pick up where I left off. But it’s been a while, so here’s a recap of the journey so far, and a peek at the journey ahead, which I think of as … the .NET era.

Note: These articles are not ordered exactly as they were published chronologically. That’s by design: I sometimes wrote them out of order, as I will continue to do. Sometimes, you come across information you realize should have been included, or that you hadn’t known about before. So you can kind of think of this in the same way that one would a book. It’s never written front-to-back. It can’t be.

Programming Windows, the Series

An introduction to the series, which focuses on how Windows application development has evolved over the years. “I believe that you can’t truly understand any platform—and in this case, how that platform has evolved over time—unless you understand how to create software for it,” I wrote at the time.

Programming Windows: A Timeline

A breakdown of the main product and technology milestones I expected to cover in the series. Plus, this nice high-level explanation for the series: “I see this series as an explanation for why things happened. The history of Windows can be seen as a series of reactions, to competitors, to market trends, and to internal forces that were seeking change.”

Programming Windows: Pre-History

In the beginning, there was Xerox Parc. Don’t worry, we didn’t end up skipping over MS-DOS.

Programming Windows: In the Beginning

The first-ever Windows API (application programming interface) provided by the Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) consisted of about 450 functions, over double the number available in the C runtime library for MS-DOS. Notably missing was a tutorial of any kind, and Windows development was hard.

Programming Windows: Hello, World

A look at the C programming language that Windows developers needed to master before they could create native applications for this new platform.

Programming Windows: Wintel

IBM’s decision to use readily-available hardware like the Intel 8088 microprocessor would have ramifications for Windows and the PC that would become especially problematic once the industry transitioned from a 16-bit architecture to 32-bit.

Programming Windows: IBM Defends the Original PC

Years later, IBM defended the technical decisions it made when it created the first PC.

Programming Windows: Windows Application Basics

“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.

Programming Windows: Hello, Windows

To create even a simple “Hello, world!”-style Windows applications, developers had to write a lot of code.

Programming Windows: Windows API Wrap-Up

An overview of how the Window...