I'm one of those poor souls who actually has to write a Windows program once in a while. I don't have a lot of experience at it, and I'm not very good at it, but I do have a couple of opinions.

• It's easiest to bite the bullet, climb on the bandwagon, and use Microsoft's tools. They may not be the best, but it's for sure that they're the most current and the best supported by examples on the web. If you Google for an answer to some particular problem, you're a lot more likely to find an example that uses Visual Studio than one that uses Delphi.


• If you're just writing programs for yourself, pick a language that you like and are comfortable with and have fun. However, if you're writing Windows programs "for real", then consider learning C# and how to write for the .NET environment. There are lots of signs, some subtle and some otherwise, that this is the way things are headed. (For the record, I have not followed this advice myself, primarily because my current client can't use .NET for historical reasons. I'm still stuck using VC++ with MFC, and it's a bit frustrating at times.)

If you use the Standard or Professional version of Visual Studio 2005, you can write standalone .EXEs using C++ (and MFC if you want) that don't require any additional DLLs or fancy installation procedures. (I don't think the free Express version allows this, and I'm not sure if you can do it in Visual Basic with any version. Check for yourself if either of these is important to you.) I try to make standalone .EXEs whenever possible because it just makes life easier. Yes, the files are bigger, but everyone has tens of gigabytes of disk space these days, so who cares?

If you write for the .NET environment (using any of the supported languages), then you get really small executables and a nearly painless installation process once you figure out the recipe. The only downside is that all your users have to have the .NET environment installed on their machines. For those that do, there's no problem. For those that don't, they have to go through a one-time download and installation process that's pretty much an automated no-brainer--although it is a big download. I couldn't guess the percentage of machines that already have .NET installed, but it's certainly getting bigger all the time.

One last hint: http://www.codeproject.com.

-- Russ