Part 2 - How To Make Notepad on Windows 2000 - Millennium Computing - rogerclark

Part 2 of a video tutorial series where we build a simple Notepad clone on Windows 2000 using C and Visual Studio 6. In this episode, we store settings in .INI files and add a few more features to the application!
Topics discussed:
- Windows 2000 and classic operating systems
- .INI files and configuration file formats
- How to learn programming (or anything else)
- Mtn Dew VooDew
#MillenniumComputing
Part 1: • How to Make Notepad on...
Source code: github.com/rogerclark/typer
edited from a Twitch stream on 8/30/2019
from my Twitch channel: / rogerclark
follow me on Twitter: / rogerclark

[@RatcheT2497]

ngl i wish this series was continued some day, or possibly even expanded on. it'd be really interesting/fun to see how a larger/more proper gui application would be grown using just w2k winapi :)

[@phasemod]

Perfect timing finding this. I’ve been going back to learn about developing for Windows operating systems from 1995-2000. I actually started my programming journey in earnest on Linux in the mid-2000s, and then later Mac OS X. So I missed out on a lot of this fun even though I was probably old enough. Sad, because I had the hardware and used Windows regularly! I agree a lot with what you said about how simple things were then and I am also unsure about some of the things we got in return from the tower of abstractions. I end up having to wade through terminology, idiosyncrasies, and other things hitched to frameworks and languages. And don’t even get me started on the Web. Windows programming back then… it was fine, actually. And the performance! Nothing has really changed fundamentally from the user’s POV except that things are slower and you have to pay monthly for software. It’s still event handling, resources, drawing boxes, etc. Everything is so heavy now. And buckle up everybody, forget your quad core multi-GHz machine; you’re going to need a whole data center of GPUs to run LLMs that generate approximate crap. I feel like I’m in the bad timeline. Thanks a lot for posting this and keeping it up! Hope to see another one someday. 🥤

[@rogerclarkonline]

thanks for watching!! i really appreciate the comment. i still agree with this, of course!

[@Sturmtreiben]

By accident I found your channel. Love it. I remember doing stuff with VCPP6 back then, having fun with OpenGL and DX and the WinAPI and still favour the Win2k style - so - sub.

[@jondoe6608]

Love the content, you just earned a new sub. I hope you continue uploading your streams to KZbin.

[@rogerclarkonline]

thanks a ton!! and that's the plan -- i've got a big project planned for the next couple weeks, keep on the lookout!

[@skreutzer]

1:58:11 Be very careful with BOOL and TRUE, as it's not C++ bool, some functions setting BOOLs to error codes that are not 1, and checking a BOOL == TRUE might fail despite the BOOL != FALSE, so always exclusively check BOOL against == FALSE or != FALSE, never against TRUE. Working with just the variable in an if or using the negation operator is fine too.

[@sassymenses]

The more confusing question for me was: Abort, Retry, Fail? In DOS. Some programs of that era could even ask Abort, Retry, Fail, Ignore? And then you try to guess the difference between all these unclear choices.

[@skreutzer]

1:37 At least it's a complete and deterministic one in comparison to later Windows versions!

[@10e999]

I like your lowlevel programming stream. In your first video you mentioned that you would do thing differently if it needed to be a more robust application. Personally, I would be interested to see you re-implement Typer with those best practices in mind. Keep up the good work ! I like to see more low level programming.

[@rogerclarkonline]

thank you! for starters, i would be keeping a better watch on resources that need to be released when appropriate. in this case, those resources include the HFONT and HICON objects. i'd also try harder to handle error situations and make sure the state of the application UI only changes in one or two places. we'll see about that in a future show!

[@10e999]

@@rogerclarkonline I'm looking forward to it.

[@chrisdickinson4576]

For some reason this reminds me of talking to Drano in Winprog in 1999.

[@rogerclarkonline]

for some reason...........

[@Karpour]

Would you consider also creating Windows CE applications and documenting that? :) Very interesting videos overall!

[@skreutzer]

2:11:57 Especially as it became very easy to ask + get help from other people, like Discord groups, StackOverflow, discussion boards, social media contacts, reaching out via Twitch or KZbin comments, and so on, if a little hand-holding, tutoring or walk-through is needed. With voice/video/screenshare conferences and live streaming.

[@arminkaric9409]

mega based, please keep up the good work!

[@mariostelzner4530]

I WAS WONDERING IF YOU COULD DO A SIMILAR C PROGRAMMING TUTORIAL FOR THE PROGRAM FINALE NOTEPAD, WHICH IS A FREE MUSIC NOTATION EDITING PROGRAM.

[@nguyenuctuananh2856]

Can you write the zoom function in Notepad?

[@skreutzer]

50:46 All bits set? Not 0. Also, #define TRUE -1 with an unsigned? LOGFONT initializer { 0 } just setting the first member to 0?

[@skreutzer]

2:09:31 I mean, who would be crazy enough to watch a programming stream on a Windows 10? Like, seriously?!?

[@skreutzer]

1:29:28 The ini file format lacks a method to declare a semantic identifier and therefore is bad for exchanging data, because the meaning/format of the data can't be determined easily + unambigiously. JSON too lacks such a mechanism and is just as bad as ini files for data exchange, so please use at least JSON-LD with a @context element/member, or XML with a namespace. JSON mostly targets browsers anyway.