C++ : Secrets of learning C++ programming

What are the secrets of C++ programming?  With the XAML and C++ tools and templates, C++ is not much more than C# to program with and you don’t have to use .NET anymore.  Unless you want to.

So the secret is that we are all out of practice working with C++ generally (if you are reading this blog, I am assuming that you are as out of practice as I was). 

Where not to start:

Tutorial: Create your first Metro style app using C++

Seriously, this is not an introduction article.  It is a good article don’t get me wrong, but it is long and somewhat boring.

The best to get started is to pull out an old C++ book, spark up the Windows 8 and just make a blank app, add some controls to the XAML and figure out how to program, just like in the old days (you didn’t expect me to write a tutorial did you?  Ok, later on this blog, but not today, or maybe I have already wrote one.  This is just a stream of consciousness with periods and lot’s of parentheses, sort of like LISP.)

Remember when Clipper came out with NO instruction manual and you just sat there typing till you figured it out?  Ok, that is an old reference.  Or when Lotus Notes was cool, devs wore their hair in pony tails (now they are bald if male)?  You just jammed, it was good.  Metro is the same way only more solid and with lots of potential customers.  You don’t have to spend days trying to explain what replication is.  Or SNOBOL, what the heck is that, oh it was the coolest parsing language ever!  Or so I remember.

Or having to write assembly language for a chip set you just got a MIMEOGRAPHED manual and all you got to program with was a keypad and a switch and an eprom memory that took 20 minutes under UV light to erase (8080 processor)

If none of that makes sense to you, then in 15 years Metro will be like that!

Go, do, make it happen.  C++ is no longer a complicated thing to hate, although the articles written about it often are.