The Win32 API is the standard API used by programs written for Microsoft's
32 bit Windows platform.  Win32 is quite a large API, and often compared to
POSIX in terms of the system services it offers (though it is much, much
bigger).  Discuss it here.

5 responses total.

I once had to maintain some legacy Win32 code (and port it to Unix).  I found
it brittle and difficult to understand, but came away with the sense that a
lot of the Windows reputation for unreliability is really due to buggy
application code, not Windows itself.  Still, it speaks volumes about that
system that something at the user level could even give the appearance of the
system crashing, and spoke to the lack of wisdom in constructing a system
interface that was so complex as to almost force applications code to be
buggy.  Still....

Programming under Win32 almost requires an IDE because there's so much
complexity that no one can manage it all, and you really do need a program
to assist you.  Compared to the Unix environment, I found this forced model
of development stifling.  But, others swear by it and say that it makes things
much easier, and that the richness of the environment makes it easy to build
complex applications quickly.

I agree. Seems to be a lot of redundancy and unnecessarily complicated data
structures. .NET seems to do a good job of abstracting/organizing the API
stuff though.

.NET is a different model, in which everything is byte code that runs on top
of a virtual machine, much like Java....

I'm thinking of wrappers for structures and functions specific to Windows.

The only programming I ever did with C under windows was windows 3.1 and the
DOS environment.  For internet stuff, this really isn't the way to go.

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