Notes by Austin Pocus

What in the Wide World of Windows

It's happened, folks. I've become a Windows dev.

Not that I'm writing all my code on Windows, at all. I just want to develop a Windows app, so: Windows it is, for the moment.

Thing is, I really don't know how things are done in this neck of the woods. I'm writing this blog post using the Github editor, for fuck's sake.

I need to learn more about the tools, but some initial thoughts:

I'm really impressed with the level of documentation here, the level of organization, and the level of design in these APIs, as far as I've seen. Yes, it's a whole other world, XAML, and C#, and what have you, but damned if I'm not intrigued.

C# was the first language whose aesthetics I really appreciated, after first trying to learn C and C++. I imagine it's verbose, yes, but also very conducive to static analysis, which is A-OK with me.

.NET seems to be an incredibly powerful, mature, and well-developed framework. Kudos to the developers, seriously, not just for the framework itself but the maintenance and development of such an ecosystem! Documenation, cross-platform support...it's truly astounding. .NET >= Java Runtime Environment.

Microsoft's dev site in general is one of the best I've ever seen.

At this point I feel I should state: no one's paying me to say this, I swear! I actually appreciate the effort the Microsoft team has gone to, here!

That said, some remnants of the Win32 days are there, one of the first APIs I was exposed to -- that shit scarred me for life. Seriously who writes a function with 10 differently typed params?!

tl;dr I'm still learning, but this is promising so far. P.S. fuck Hungarian notation.