Chapter 1, Introduction, gives an introduction to Small Windows, which is a class library that encapsulates a part of the Win32 API.

Chapter 2, Hello, Small World!, starts by building a (very) small application—the Small Windows version of the famous Hello World program. Then, we will continue with a (still rather small) application that handles circles in a window. The user can add and move circles, change their colors, and save and load circles.

Chapter 3, Building a Tetris Application, explores a version of the classic Tetris game. Seven different kinds of figure are falling down the screen and the user’s task is to move or rotate them so that as many rows as possible can be completely filled and removed.

Chapter 4, Working with Shapes and Figures, teaches you how to build a drawing program, which can be regarded as a more advanced version of the circle application. It is possible to create and remove figures as well as mark and drag figures.

Chapter 5, The Figure Hierarchy, continues to build the drawing program. We can define a class hierarchy with lines, arrows, rectangles, and ellipses.

Chapter 6, Building a Word Processor, describes a word processor capable of formatting individual characters.

Chapter 7, Keyboard Input and Character Calculation, discusses how the word processor handles many keyboard input combinations and calculates the size and position of each individual character.

Chapter 8, Building a Spreadsheet Application, talks about the final application, which is a spreadsheet program capable of calculating formulas with the four rules of arithmetic. It is also possible to cut and paste blocks of cells.

Chapter 9, Formula Interpretation, explains that when the user inputs a formula, we need to interpret it. The process is divided into scanning and parsing, which we will look into in this chapter.

Chapter 10, The Framework, describes the most central part of Small Windows. This chapter begins the description of Small Windows. The Application class handles the message loop of the application and the registration of Windows classes. The Window class handles basic window functionality.

Chapter 11, The Document, talks about the document-based Window subclasses, that is, the Document class that provides basic document functionality, such as menus and accelerators, and the Standard Document framework, which provides a document-based framework.

Chapter 12, The Auxiliary Classes, explores a set of small auxiliary classes handling points and sizes, rectangles, colors and fonts, dynamic lists, and tree structures.

Chapter 13, The Registry, Clipboard, Standard Dialogs, and Print Preview, explains the implementation of the registry and clipboard, the standard dialogs to save and load files, choosing color or font, or printing a document. The chapter also explains the implementation a class for print previewing.

Chapter 14, Dialogs, Controls, and Print Setup, describes the possibility to design custom dialogs with controls such as push buttons, check boxes, radio buttons, list boxes, combo boxes, and text field. The input of a text field can be converted to any type. Finally, the Print Setup dialog is a custom dialog annotated with suitable controls.

First of all, you need to download Visual Studio on your computer. I suggest you download and install Express for Desktop, which is free, and is available at https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-express-vs.aspx.

Then, there are two ways to install Small Windows:

This book is for application developers who want a head-first approach into Windows programming. It will teach you how to develop an object-oriented class library in C++ and enhanced applications in Windows. Basic knowledge of C++ and the object-oriented framework is assumed to get the most out of this book.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The first part of a Small Windows application is the MainWindow function."

A block of code is set as follows:

void MainWindow(vector<String>argumentList,
                SmallWindows::WindowShow windowShow);

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "For instance, often, the Open item in the File menu is annotated with the text Ctrl+O."

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