Friday, June 06, 2008

C++ and COM, the way to program Windows

I presented a session this morning at TechEd on building applications that work with Windows Vista Sync Center. Sync Center exposes COM interfaces and requires your application to expose COM interfaces.
This is easy, this is Windows software development like it has been for at least 10 years. It is well defined, well known and well supported.
Hearing developers complain about having to use C++ and do COM development today made me realise that the .NET developer generation is missing out on so many areas of the Windows development opportunities.
My advice, go and learn C++ and COM, it is how many of the Windows Vista features are exposed to developers and with good reason.
If you are not prepared to learn how to program your computer then you should question why you are in the software development business.

8 comments:

Unknown said...

Great post Niel!

Learning C++ and COM is deff on my lists of things to do. My two favorite courses at uni was functionall programming in Scheme and micro controller software design (C programming). I never did C++ (did Delphi back in the days), so wan't to pick this stuff up :)

cheers,
Jonas Follesø
RD, Norway (now in Melbourne for a year)

icelava said...

Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky also had a debate going on at the Stackoverflow.com podcast whether programmers should or not learn C to get strong grips with whats happening close to the metal.

What is your recommended book list to ease developers into the C/C++ realm?

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