This is my first post on WINDOWS PROGRAMMING. I’m writting this post after lot study and practice. In this section i’ve tried to explain how to write programs that run under Microsoft Windows 98, Microsoft Windows NT 4.0, and Windows NT 5.0 and new versions of windows. These programs are written in the C programming language and use the native Windows application programming interfaces (APIs). As I’ll discuss in further post that this chapter, this is not the only way to write programs that run under Windows. However, it is important to understand the Windows APIs regardless of what you eventually use to write your code.

Its very important to know C. If you don’t know C, Windows programming is probably not a good place to start. I recommend that you learn C in a character-mode environment such as that offered under the Windows 98 MS-DOS Command Prompt window. Most of the people use Turbo C/C++  compiler to write programs. Windows programming sometimes involves aspects of C that don’t show up much in character-mode programming; in those cases, I’ll devote some discussion to them. But for the most part, you should have a good working familiarity with the language, particularly with C structures and pointers. Some knowledge of the standard C run-time library is helpful but not required.

The basic requirement to start with the Windows Programming is you should have a 32-bit C compiler installed on the system and development environment suitable for doing Windows programming. I’ll be assuming that you’re using Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0, which can be purchased separately or as a part of the Visual Studio 6.0 package. Visual C++ can be used on any windows platform.

That’s it. I’m not going to assume that you have any experience at all programming for a graphical user interface such as Windows.