Interview with Charles Petzold

Interesting interview with Charles Petzold on the .NET Rocks! site - this is an audio interview, the interview gets started about 20 minutes into the stream (it's worth skipping the first 20 minutes!).

Charles is the author of the Programming Windows books, now in their 5th edition - Petzold's book was one of the first books I'd read on Windows Programming, and is considered by many to be the "Bible" of Windows Programming books.

It's interesting to see how programming for Microsoft operating systems has changed over the years, when programming on MS-DOS most of my code was written in assembler (I made the move from CP/M-80 over to MS-DOS for a specific customer project), initially still programming against the BDOS and BIOS functions - programming in assembler was time consuming, but gave the smallest, fastest applications - writing TSR's (Terminate and Stay Resident) was always a challenge - moving to "C" accelerated the time to write applications (when compared with assembler), I still spend a good percentage of time writing code in C++ calling the native Win32 API's for Windows CE, and Windows XP/Embedded. All of the newer tools/applications I write are being coded in C# (btw, have you noticed that the '#' is four plus signs put together, kinda like C++++ (C Plus Plus, Plus Plus)) - I really, really like programming against the .NET Framework in C#, it's incredibly productive - two of my most recent tools (CEFileWiz and MFCOCXWiz) have both been coded in less than two hours in C# (see my home page for links to the tools) - It would be challenging to write the same applications in Win32...

- Mike