Hello world!

As the title says: Hello world!

Well I guess that I should write some very cool lines here as those are the first published on that new blog out in the internet but if you ask people from my personal environment you most likely will always here the same response: "Oh dear, he's just terrible at writing stuff like that!". To be honest they're not really wrong with that ;). Regarding this fact ill just focus on giving you a little preview on what this blog will be about.

Within this blog you will be able to find articles and tutorials about various aspects of the application programming interface (API) all Windows versions provide. It will cover commonly known aspects (like creating windows, interacting with the user, operating with files, ...) together with subjects that may be less known to the broad public (like manifests, mechanics of COM, visual themes, ...). It is always my main goal to bring these topics to you on a way that is understandable also for people that never used the Win32 API until yet.

In the preceding paragraphs I used the word "programming". This brings us to an important question: "What knowledge do I need to have to understand what you are writing about?". Actually this depends on each article. If you for example start understanding COM its recommended that you know the fundamental datatypes used in the API or how to act with the registry. Of course if I make an article about a subjects and it covers knowledge that was taught in previous (or upcoming) articles i will link to them so that you can read through them if something is not clear. Concerning that it actually will be possible to read every article and understand it even if you have never used the API before. It may just take longer because you need to read and understand all of the other articles that may be linked! Of course at the beginning that may not be true as I just haven wrote enough articles to make references to every topic. To be honest there is one very important fact you should know: This is not an introduction in the programming languages used! (mostly C++ and C#) You need to know the basic concepts of the programming languages as they will not be explained in the articles! But don't worry, it really just means the basics.

Here are some books that may help you with that if you never used C++ or C# before:
C++ Primer by Stanley B. Lippman
C++ Primer by Stephen Prata (i used that at university)
Microsoft Visual C# 2010 Step by Step by John Sharp (Kindle edition)
Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4 Platform by Andrew Troelsen

Ok, now we have talked enough about what will be here soon and i think its time to start writing articles. Make sure to recheck that blog regularly even if theres nothing interesting for you know. Maybe tomorrow there will be a new article that covers a new subject that attracts you ;).

See you
Yanick