I'm more or less a beginner programmer with a little (mostly useless) programming background. My goal is to develop applications to run on my PPC (a Dell Axim 3).
My Background: Did some simple Basic programming on a TRS-80 in the late 70’s when they were the cutting edge(!), as well as Commadore 64, Apple IIe. In early 90's got into a little Machine Language programming on Apple LC, but I didn't get far with that. Then I discovered Hypercard 2.1 (on a Mac), which is not really a language, but a simple Windows environment that I could use. It let you create and manipulate Cards (i.e. Windows essentially), Text Fields and Buttons without complicated setup and initiate routines. Simple scripts were possible in the cards, fields and buttons and it worked by sending messages. (In retrospect, seems very similar to what I'm reading about Windows).
Current Setup: I now have a Homebuilt PC with a Athlon 650MHz cpu, about 250MB RAM, 60GB Hard disk, running Windows 2000. I downloaded Microsoft embedded Visual C++ 4.0, the SDK for Pocket PC 2003, and all the Service packs I needed to work the program and got the "Hello World" application to work on the Pocket PC emulator. So that is good.
Now I am trying to learn C++. I picked up the Standard C++ Bible (Al Stevens & Clayton Walnum) which seems very understandable and logical (I’ve made it pretty quickly through Variables, Functions, For and While loops, Arrays & Pointers). All the provided code works fine on the compiler that comes with the book (Quincy 99), but somehow that gets me nowhere with working embedded Visual C++. Also, the book never talks about the Windows environment, so I picked up a book called Introduction to MFC Programming with Visual C++ (Richard Jones) to tackle Windows - one of a very small number of books on MFC that are currently in print. This book also seems very logical and understandable, and I'd be running code like that except that I can't get any of the provided code to compile in either Quincy or eVC++. I thought that there might be sufficient similarity between Visual C++ and embedded Visual C++ for it to just work, but that is apparently not the case.
The problem with Quincy is probably just that it lacks the right file <afxwin.h>. Of course if it did compile, it would most likely not be able to make an app out of the code that would run on my PPC. But I would be happy to be there, just for the purpose of learning to write the code. Then I could use eVC++ to make apps for the PPC, except I don’t know how to run it. EVC++ is much more complicated. I’ve tried compiling a little code from the book, and I get error messages left and right - I most likely do not have all the proper files and components in place. I’ve tried the eVC++ app Wizard, which creates lots of files (5 source files, 6 header files, 2 resource files, classes... ...A whole ton of stuff and I have no clue where to put provided code from the book or how to start writing my own code to fit into the structure.
So I basically have 2 problems: 1) getting a setup (compiler or “platform, “SDK, or whatever) that will run the code from Intro to MFC Programming, and 2) Finding out what I need to know about eVC++ so that it will eventually run code for my PPC.
EVC++ Help told me I should learn MFC from a book called Programming Windows with MFC (Jeff Prosise), which is out of print and reportedly not a straight ahead book for beginning programmers.
Anybody have suggestions?
Thanks