Welcome to My Blog!

This blog is my workspace for the book with the working title “C++ for C# Developers – with Windows 8 Programming”. I have created the blog to announce you the idea of the book, and let you know my progress. Of course, the aim of the blog is exactly the same as the goal of the book: I intend to help you get acquainted with the C++ programming language using your existing C# knowledge.

To let you understand why I got the idea of this book may be obvious for you, but let’s tell you my story…

Kids, if I’d intended to write this book ten years ago, its title probably had been “Programming .NET Framework in C#—for C++ Developers”. However, the world changed a lot in the last few years.

I had started learning C++ during my university years at the end of the 1980’s, and I used this great programming language till 1995. For a few years, I worked on a hospital information system project using Windows 3, which involved digital image management. That time when this project had been started, it was natural to program such systems in C++.

I always worked very close to Microsoft technologies, and the breeze of evolution reached my company, too. In 1994, I became a Visual Basic programmer, because that time VB meant the promise of easy and fast three-tier architectures. If you’d ever worked with Visual Basic—I mean the old one before .NET—, you may understand why I cheered up in 1996, when Borland released Delphi 1.0, and finally I could use a real object-oriented language after a fake one, again.

The world turned around for me when I heard about a new programming language, called C#. This moment in the summer of 2000 shepherded me to the herd of .NET developers and I became one of the evangelists of this modern framework and the C# language. I was happy with C# and after using it for a few years I slowly forgot about my roots. Sometimes it even happened that I scorned C++ developers because of their low productivity.

Most of us know that the only constant thing in this world is the change. The BUILD 2011 conference held in Anaheim, CA, where Microsoft introduced and released Windows 8 Developer Preview, for me was not only about the operating system, but also about C++. After attending at a few sessions upon this old-new programming language, all of a sudden I found my interest of C++ growing. At that time we—three of my Hungarian friends and me—had already signed a contract with Wiley to write a beginner’s book about Windows 8 application development, and it happened that I was the one undertaking the chapter about C++.

Those experiences led me to writing this book. After so much slight and being ungrateful with this old friend, I had to start learning C++ again. Instead of choosing the from-scratch-path, I decided to approach C++ from the direction of C#, as in the last ten years I had mostly C# in my head and my heart.

Kids, this is how I commenced writing this book.