Question

so i read a tutorial saying it is not worth it to memorize the windows API template. Do you as programmers memorize the template or just create one from the wizard? also does anyone know a good web source to learn windows programming better? theForger’s is okay but more of a reference guide than a learning source

Answer 1

It is always beneficial to understand how something works before using tools that hide some of that stuff away. There’s no harm in using class wizards and templates in the long term, but you’ll find debugging problems much easier if you grok what things those wizards and templates did for you and what those things do. This holds true whether if is Win32, .NET, or any other API.

It is especially helpful when programming .NET to have an understanding of the operating system on which it executes and how certain .NET features (such as events) map to the underlying system (e.g Windows messages), as this can really help when debugging some bizarre situations (such as re-entrancy in a .NET ListView control when asking for the item count in a paint message).

That said, it is not imperative that you know these things, just helpful. You certainly shouldn’t need to remember the signatures of specific methods – documentation will always help you out there. In general, remember how things work, not how you call them.