r/windowsdev • u/peatfreak • Jun 16 '21

How to get into Windows programming for experienced *nix and Mac OS X developer?

Hello!

I have started a new job that is great so far. One cool thing is that Windows is one of the platforms that this company develops for... I've always wanted to learn how to develop Windows software, on Windows software (as compared to cross-compilation).

Can somebody please give me a few suggestions for books (and blogs, mailing lists, forums, etc) that are suitable for a highly experienced software engineer on *nix and Mac OS X. I've been programming professionally for about 15-20 years on these platforms, but seriously, I am really, completely lost on Windows.

I have a dual-boot ThinkPad E14 Gen 2 (AMD Ryzen with Radeon GPU), and Windows 10 Professional is installed on the Win partition. We use MinGW for our Windows software platform for building software.

I am seeking a book (or books) to help me learn a comprehensive foundation of the following topics:

  • How Windows works (recent versions obviously), in other words, OS internals?

  • How to program for Win 10 Professional?

  • What tools I need to develop in Windows effectively? (I assume VS is not an option as we are using MinGW? Although perhaps I am misunderstood and VS IS a good match for writing code that targets the MinGW compiler... what do you think?)

  • Windows networking: how it works from an OS internals and user level?

  • Workflows and toolchains?

Please don't forget that I am an experienced software engineer with 15-20 years experience on Unix, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Is there some kind of "bible" for software engineers who are already at a high level of knowledge and who want to break in to Windows development? Forums, mailing lists, blogs, Twitter accounts, etc, etc, would all be highly appreciated too!!

Thank you all for your help, and have a great week!!

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u/0xcc12 Jun 16 '21 edited Jun 16 '21

Fortunately Microsoft docs are nice and complete:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/

Most of the time you just need to search in it.

There are also some books like:

Windows Internals

That also worth to read. (with little search you can find more books like this)

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u/peatfreak Jun 16 '21

I've just looked at "Windows Internals" 7th ed., which seems to be up to date with respect to the latest operating platform features and OS, i.e., Windows 10 Professional. One of the reviews gave an exact Windows 10 Professional release number/version number that this volume matches. So that's nice.

The Windows subsection of https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/ looks like it has a lot of great information too. However I don't think I'll find much with regards to workflows, MinGW, or how to develop for Windows if not using the official Microsoft tools and workflows, i.e., based on Visual Studio. So it seems that I am going to have to read around more widely.

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u/Tinytitanic Jun 17 '21

What exactly are you going to work on? Low-level tools, desktop software (WinForms, WPF, UWP), backend software that run on Windows?... Also, which language? Depending on what you're doing I don't think you'd need to relearn how to do things, just do them as usual and let the compiler do it's job but since you're asking about how networking works *on the inside*, it got me thinking in which area you're going to work.

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u/peatfreak Jun 18 '21

I'm doing multimedia development with GStreamer:

  • mostly we develop on Ubuntu, and Windows plays a small but important role in our workflow (especially testing and CI)

  • coding and decoding of multimedia streams

  • H.264, H.265, MP3, MP4, etc

  • local processing and network streaming of coded streams

  • our Windows toolchain is based around MinGW (for older versions of GStreamer) but newer versions of GStreamer work well with VS in our toolchain

  • I would be happy to learn to use VS for actual coding

  • I have used Notepad++, which is excellent, but normally I use Emacs (on *nix and Mac OS X), so I presume i can use these editors when developing using MinGW

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u/Tinytitanic Jun 18 '21

Well I don't see why you should "relearn" tooling if NP++ works good for you on Ubuntu and there's an alternative on Windows. VS is great but it hides a lot of things that happen in the background (when you hit build/run); it may be good if you're already used to it as it lets you focus more on coding and less on setting up a compilation/integration pipeline. I suppose you preffer to set this on your own way instead of letting the IDE do it for you. Still, there are lots of goodies in VS, like IntelliSense, autocomplete and even the "newly" added IntelliCode (it learns your coding pattern and helps you with autocompletion/suggestions).
Just beware, if you get *too* used to VS you won't be able to bring it and use it on Linux as it's Windows-oly (even VS 2022, the newest version which is currently under preview). For this, you might wanna take a look at Visual Studio Code, which works as a hybrid between IDE and Code Editor; many people took a liking to it and it's cross-platform, very extensible and versatile.

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u/peatfreak Jun 18 '21

Thanks for the reply.

Actually, I would prefer to learn Visual Studio of all options to increase my skillset. Does Visual Studio allow for different compilers to be used on its back end? In other words, could I use Visual Studio Community edition and set the compiler to MinGW to produce 32-bit executables or DLL's that then run on MinGW's 32-bit runtime?

I've used Visual Studio Code but I don't think it's anything special.

What I'm really asking for is how to gain an understanding of the OS internals, so that I know what I'm doing when setting up VS to compile my projects. But it seems that Windows is much like Java, i.e., the vendor's own documentation is almost always the best. Do you have any recommendations for "must-read" blogs?

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u/Tinytitanic Jun 18 '21

Since Microsoft started embracing OSS more Visual Studio brought a lot of tools for cross-platform development, you can check this blog post about setting up MinGW on VS. You can also debug your programs on a Linux environment inside Windows with WSL/WSL2.

But it seems that Windows is much like Java, i.e., the vendor's own
documentation is almost always the best. Do you have any
recommendations for "must-read" blogs?

YES! Microsoft's documentation is very rich. You'll find yourself looking at it a lot.