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As a big fan of Charles Petzold's books Code and The Annotated Turing I came across his book Programming Windows which teaches Win32 programming in C. I am a freshman computer science student who learned C first, but I use C# and .NET for Windows programming now, so I was wondering if Win32 is still relevant to professional Windows programs. Would it be worth it to me, as a student who wants to program Windows applications, to learn the Win32 API to the depth that the book covers?
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The Windows API is still being developed. For example, see Windows 8.1 New APIs and features for developers and Windows 8 and 8.1 API Index. Obsolete? Not likely.
Win32 is essentially deprecated and the native toolkit from Windows 8 on is the WinRT components/engines in "Windows. UI. *" which natively speak XAML (and natively here means these are C++ components baked into the OS). WPF has much more in common with the modern Windows.
No. Win32 is used by so many applications (including those that ship with Windows), that it's going to be there for a long long time.
Alternatively referred to as the Windows API and WinAPI, Win32 is the main set of Microsoft Windows APIs used for developing 32-bit applications. These APIs are responsible for functions in the following categories: Administration and Management - Install, configure, and service applications or systems.
It really depends on the kinds of applications you want to develop. For most purposes these days, C# and .NET are completely suitable. However, there are certain kinds of applications that need as few dependencies as possible (shell extensions come to mind) that are not practical to do as .NET applications. For those you would need Win32.
As always, it pays to have at least a basic understanding of Win32 even if you're using .NET for most of your work.
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