Late night

Wowee. It is awfully late (for me) but I am so pumped that I felt obligated to post to declare my triumph. Last week I decided I was going to write a Win32 C program to play wav files for no reason other than I've never done anything like this. I did some simple C stuff in Linux in college with a smidgeon of Visual C++, but I've long forgotten most of that.

It took me a long evening last week to get Visual Studio installed and a simple Hello World program compiled and running with debug symbols. Since Visual Studio Express Edition is free and missing all sorts of functionality, I had to download a freeware resource file editor and a hex editor for examining the file format of wav files . Every single step of getting anything working required me to do an Internet search; basically I had (have?) no clue what I'm doing. Setting up a win32 development environment is obviously a whole lot different than a C environment on Linux (which is nearly always set up by default upon installation) or a Java environment.

As for general Visual Studio observations, maybe it's because I have the free edition or maybe because I'm blind and can't find it, but I am really missing refactoring support like in a current Java IDE. That's my main complaint at the moment.

But to finally get to my massive accomplishment of the night: I was able to finally get a wav file playing. My main problem was exactly this, most like resulting from the fact that I completely forgot about fundamental concepts like the stack and variable scope. That took me a good 3-4 hours to figure out; I've been spoiled by Java's garbage collecting. Now to get something other than an empty frame with random message boxes in my program...

Or maybe I'll just go to bed.