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[TSTwizby]

I'm not entirely sure whether or not I should have posted this in the programming thread, but it seemed distinct enough to warrant its own thread. I've been trying to learn how to make simple windows applications, using Microsoft Visual Studio. The version I currently have is the Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Professional beta, and I am incapable of finding any information anywhere about how to use it including in its own help documents. I have successfully written several console applications using tutorials meant for earlier versions of Visual Studio, but all of the tutorials I have found for applications using GUI's do not work, the problem seemingly being that some names of things have changed between versions. I am pretty new to this, though not new to programming in general, and have no clue what I am doing, largely why I have been searching out tutorials. Can anyone either recommend a source of tutorials, or give advice as to whether I should try an earlier verision of Visual Studio or else a different compiler entirely. I would prefer to stick with either C++ or assembly as a language as I have been trying to learn to use both recently. I have tried to use MASM to program in assembly, but my antivirus is constantly blocking it and not allowing me to retrieve it from quarantine. Thank you.

[kaijyuu]

http://cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/
http://lazyfoo.net/SDL_tutorials/index.php

[TSTwizby]

Thank you. The second link helped me a lot.

Now I'm confused by the different versions of SDL available. Some seem to specify the compiler to be used with them. The site you linked to has a supply which includes many, but none corresponding to the version of Visual Studio I have. The SDL site has only two available and distinguishes between runtime and development libraries. The runtime libraries seem to not depend on the compiler, which makes sense, but the only two compilers for which they provide development libraries are Mingw32 and Visual C++, neither of which I am familiar with, so I must reiterate my original question.

[kaijyuu]

(was hoping someone else could answer that. Alas)

Can't answer your question myself, as I've never used a Microsoft compiler. I use mingw with a wacky IDE that hasn't been updated since 2007.

[TSTwizby]

Alright then, I guess for now I'll give another compiler a shot. Thank you.

[olemars]

Switch to VS 2010. 11 seems to be a horrid mess and mostly geared for Metro/windows 8 development.

I'm a bit of a fanboy, but I would recommend the Qt library and looking through the heap of tutorials and examples that come with it.

[Virex]

If you don't need cross-platform portability or you're dead-set on using Assembler, you'd need to look into the Windows API. Here's a tutorial for C++: http://www.winprog.org/tutorial/. Here's one for C: http://www.zetcode.com/gui/winapi/, and here's the MSDN link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc433218(VS.85).aspx where you should be able to find the syscalls you need for Assembly programming. EDIT: Apparently they don't provide the syscalls there. I'm not exactly sure how or where to find that data and if Windows even uses syscalls for all these functions (There are a lot of them, but then again a 32-bit word is pretty big as well).

[TSTwizby]

Okay, Visual Studio 2010 is not working with SDL or even working with its own tutorials that I've been able to find, the most immediate difference being the replacement of the 'main' function with the '_tmain' function. From what I understand this shouldn't matter, and console applications work as expected, but nothing works the same in reference to windowed applications and SDL appears to just not work, as I mentioned. I've tried mingw, which doesn't seem to include the actual file which runs the compiler after I installed it. I can't find an up to date version of SDL for anything else. Virex, I checked out the C++ tutorial site and it seems to be based primarily off of Visual Studio 2008, which I'm somewhat leery of given my experience with 2010 and 11. The msdn videos as I mentioned have proven incompatible with what they are supposed to work with somehow, though the zetcode link looks promising. I haven't checked out the assembly links yet, but I should get around to it soon.

[Aklyon]

Just windows, or Metro applications?

[olemars]

If you get any errors you should post them.

[TSTwizby]

I'm not sure what metro applications are. I should have thought to post what errors I was getting, sorry about that.

For the widowed program tutorials what I have been doing is opening up Visual studio, copying and pasting the text that you are supposed to copy and paste from the tutorials, and getting errors about undeclared identifier

code:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

#include <Windows.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <tchar.h>

int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, LPSTR lpCmdLine, int nCmdShow);
LRESULT CALLBACK WndProc(HWND, UINT, WPARAM, LPARAM);

int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance,
                   HINSTANCE hPrevInstance,
                   LPSTR lpCmdLine,
                   int nCmdShow)
{
    WNDCLASSEX wcex;

    wcex.cbSize = sizeof(WNDCLASSEX);
    wcex.style          = CS_HREDRAW | CS_VREDRAW;
    wcex.lpfnWndProc    = WndProc;
    wcex.cbClsExtra     = 0;
    wcex.cbWndExtra     = 0;
    wcex.hInstance      = hInstance;
    wcex.hIcon          = LoadIcon(hInstance, MAKEINTRESOURCE(IDI_APPLICATION));
    wcex.hCursor        = LoadCursor(NULL, IDC_ARROW);
    wcex.hbrBackground  = (HBRUSH)(COLOR_WINDOW+1);
    wcex.lpszMenuName   = NULL;
    wcex.lpszClassName  = szWindowClass;
    wcex.hIconSm        = LoadIcon(wcex.hInstance, MAKEINTRESOURCE(IDI_APPLICATION));

    if (!RegisterClassEx(&wcex))
    {
        MessageBox(NULL,
            _T("Call to RegisterClassEx failed!"),
            _T("Win32 Guided Tour"),
            NULL);

        return 1;
    }

    hInst = hInstance; // Store instance handle in our global variable

    // The parameters to CreateWindow explained:
    // szWindowClass: the name of the application
    // szTitle: the text that appears in the title bar
    // WS_OVERLAPPEDWINDOW: the type of window to create
    // CW_USEDEFAULT, CW_USEDEFAULT: initial position (x, y)
    // 500, 100: initial size (width, length)
    // NULL: the parent of this window
    // NULL: this application dows not have a menu bar
    // hInstance: the first parameter from WinMain
    // NULL: not used in this application
    HWND hWnd = CreateWindow(
        szWindowClass,
        szTitle,
        WS_OVERLAPPEDWINDOW,
        CW_USEDEFAULT, CW_USEDEFAULT,
        500, 100,
        NULL,
        NULL,
        hInstance,
        NULL
    );

    if (!hWnd)
    {
        MessageBox(NULL,
            _T("Call to CreateWindow failed!"),
            _T("Win32 Guided Tour"),
            NULL);

        return 1;
    }

    // The parameters to ShowWindow explained:
    // hWnd: the value returned from CreateWindow
    // nCmdShow: the fourth parameter from WinMain
    ShowWindow(hWnd,
        nCmdShow);
    UpdateWindow(hWnd);

    // Main message loop:
    MSG msg;
    while (GetMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0))
    {
        TranslateMessage(&msg);
        DispatchMessage(&msg);
    }

    return (int) msg.wParam;
}

errors:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

source.cpp(26): error C2065: 'szWindowClass' : undeclared identifier
source.cpp(39): error C2065: 'hInst' : undeclared identifier
source.cpp(61): error C2065: 'szWindowClass' : undeclared identifier
source.cpp(61): error C2065: 'szTitle' : undeclared identifier

When I try to run a program which includes SDL, the computer cannot find SDL.dll, which I had put in my system32 folder. It didn't make a difference whether I used the 32 or 64 bit versions of SDL.dll.

[Aklyon]

Metro applications are things that use the (rather useless I'd say on the desktop) Metro interface in Windows 8.

[Tellemurius]

Metro applications are things that use the (rather useless I'd say on the desktop) Metro interface in Windows 8.

Metro was created on Windows Phone 7