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Life As a C/Win32 API Programmer

Traditionally speaking, developing software for the Windows family of operating systems involved

using the C programming language in conjunction with the Windows application programming

interface (API). While it is true that numerous applications have been successfully created using this

time-honored approach, few of us would disagree that building applications using the raw API is a

complex undertaking.

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The first obvious problem is that C is a very terse language. C developers are forced to contend

with manual memory management, ugly pointer arithmetic, and ugly syntactical constructs. Fur-

thermore, given that C is a structured language, it lacks the benefits provided by the object-oriented

approach (can anyone say 

spaghetti code?). When you combine the thousands of global functions

and data types defined by the Win32 API to an already formidable language, it is little wonder that

there are so many buggy applications floating around today.