i really would like to know what is the difference between MFC & WIN32 programming .... ?? and what is the difference between MFC , WIN32 applications ans Console applications from the point of memory avialability and usage ??

MFC, Microsoft Foundation Classes, are Microsoft's Framework for Visual C++. Theses classes and the associated Wizard help to build quickly a project skeletons skeletons. With MFC it is all uncontrollable OOP. You will be taking your framework and only moddifying what you will use and such. Everything is done for you already for the most part, you just add in your code. MFC you have a "drag and drop" style of RAD development. Because of this, MFC uses a bit more base memory to beging with in terms of size, thus inducing a runtime speed hit. However, since you will be saving *A LOT* of time with the quick designing of your GUI it is well worth it.

WIN32 is the core of MFC. It is how you would go about programattically making windows programs without MFC. basically you do everything yourself, and I mean everything. THis can be OOP if you want it to, but it is not by default design. You are working at the core, so using Pure WIN32 is faster, but much harder and longer to develop with. Most programs have to use Win32 as a base rather than MFC because MFC adds in a lot of extras and is relativly slow with windows GDI, which can be choosen to not be used with pure Win32 - take a look at NeHe's frameworks.

That's about it I think. [smile] It all depends on what you are doing of course before you can make a decision. I know with my audio library testing I went with MFC because it was fast to create a GUI that let me test the library. You can take a look at what the MFC program looks like in my profile link. I didn't cover console much because, well, it's the base really, you can't do much windows programing with just console - but you can add a console to your windows programs.

- Drew

Quote:Original post by barakat
and what is the difference between MFC , WIN32 applications ans Console applications from the point of memory avialability and usage ??

None.

MFC applications simply use the Microsoft Foundation Classes as a wrapper around the native Win32 API, but all the Win32 functionality is available and accessible. For certain operations, MFC can be a massive boon.

Console applications define a different entry point, allocate a console and redirect stdin, stdout and stderr to it, but still have full access to the Win32 API. So, again, there is no fundamental difference. And yes, you can add a console to your Win32 applications. See the AllocConsole and FreeConsole APIs.

so where can i start learning windows API ??

Quote:Original post by barakat
so where can i start learning windows API ??

MSDN is a great resource. They have some code samples to get you started too. I also would recomend Programming Windows by Petzold. I have an older edition of this book, and it walks you through a lot of windows api topics. Once you get going though the MSDN docs cover everything you need.

Hi,

If you're looking for a good site to get started, check out this! It's what first taught me quite a while back. I had it saved on favorites :)

Hope that helps!

GCS584