Printable View
I've got a little experience with C from college. I'm just getting interested in writing windows app's. Where does C fit in with windows? Can you code programs in C using Visual Studio .NET?
How difficult would it be to switch to C++? Thanks in advance for everyone's advice.
Well, you can write any windows program using only C -- the windows API was designed like that. It would probably be wiser to look into C++, though, as windows programming really benefits from the object-oriented nature of C++. They are wrapper classes like MFC which make some of the details easier, although it's a good idea to know what's going on under the hood.
C/C++ is and will be the foundation of Windows OS. Stay with C/C++ and you will be fine.
Kuphryn
The switch from C to basic C++ is easy, but you'll have to unlearn some C habits.
More advanced C++ comes with time.
MS really advocates the use of C and C++ for writing programs. Though C++ is pretty much becoming the standard since many of the features of Windows programming are really meant for C++ (like COM and OLE just to name a few). But C still has its place. Hell I still use a fair amount of assembler for windows programming.
Because C++ is (mostly) a subset of C++, you CAN compile C programs with Visual Studio, and most of the time the compiler won't know, or care!
Charles Petzold's book "Programming Windows" uses C. It isn't necessary to use C++ to access the Windows API, and Petzold uses fairly simple program examples. His examples are not short... there is a lot of "overhead" for windows programs... but the program flow/logic/algorithms are not complex.
I do recommend Petzold's book, and here's a link to a Windows Tutorial
Ah, I wouldn't call it that. Especially since C99.
The compiler DOES know and DOES care. A great deal. It decides on file endings: c is compiled as C code, cpp and cc as C++ code. Two different parts of the compiler are invoked, and trust me, they do differ.
>>>
The compiler DOES know and DOES care. A great deal. It decides on file endings: c is compiled as C code, cpp and cc as C++ code. Two different parts of the compiler are invoked, and trust me, they do differ.
<<<
However, if you open a C++ file, (i.e. with a .cpp extension), and write C in it, the complier will compile it.
Are you sure?
If you open a cpp file and write pure and old C in it (look at the zlib source for examples) then the compiler will not compile it unless it's inside extern "C" braces.