[ot] Windows programming

[Doug Sutherland]

The simplest windows programming environment for a linux programmer 
is of course GNU C, which you have already mentioned. Cygwin is more 
full functioned than MinGW but more complex and has a few quirks that 
I really do not like, for example it's installation process is bizarre and 
annoying, the way it maps windows directories to unix naming is weird,
the options for file types can be confusing, and I found that sometimes 
its impossible to remove all of cygwin. It creates some files that just 
cannot be deleted, I hate software that does that. On the other hand 
it's an impressive environment, you can almost have it look exactly 
like a linux machine.I have used Cygwin and MinGW and I have to 
say that MinGW was simple in the way I like it. I do not like complex 
development environments. I don't want to spend a week just to 
figure out how to do hello world. MinGW is faster to get actually 
programming with, and although limited in comparison, was just 
right for my needs. It has the win32 API:

http://www.mingw.org/docs.shtml#win32api

I did some win32 with this and I loved it because it's GNU and very 
straightforward. The Win32 API however is extremely complex and 
very annoying. Surprised? <g> Your battle will be more one of 
understanding the win32 API that one of tools. It can take quite a 
while to do the simplest of things with win32. I would recommend 
looking for some small tutorials, that's what I did and found a few 
that got me started. Find a getting started tutorial for MinGW and 
look for really simple win32 examples. I didn't do any win32 serial 
code but you can most likely find some examples on the net. 
I don't know anything about SAPI.

  -- Doug