My Tutorial site - Constructive critisism welcome

[lonewolff]

Hi guys,
You may or may not have noticed by my signature, that I have been working on my own tutorial based site for a couple of months now.

It is starting to come along. At the moment it focuses mainly on Winsock networking, which I know that some of you would appreciate as people sometimes like to be able to network their Ogre apps. There is a little bit of general Win32 programming in there and time permitting, I would like to put some Ogre stuff in as well (since Ogre is what inspired me to get into programming years ago.)

I was wondering if you would share some thoughts on how you think this site is progressing and critique as you feel fit.

At this stage I have been able to squeeze in a tutorial about once a week, but I am sure this rate is not sustainable. We shall see.

I mainly started it, because I often have to re-learn the same stuff over and over due to work and other commitments. So, I thought I would place useful (to me anyway) code in one easily accessible place to stop this cycle and hopefully help others along the way.

The site is http://www.win32developer.com (Yes, platform locking again - I know )

Let us know what you think

Thanks in advance,
Lonewolff

[madmarx]

Hi,
it seems you have forgotten an "e" in the webadress of your website (cf previous post)?
Anyway well done + I like the colors of your website,

Pierre

[lonewolff]

Well spotted, thanks!

[Wretched_Wyx]

I think another Win32 tutorial site would be very welcomed. Especially if you keep rolling with it. The biggest thing I see, is you end up (say you're "starting over" again) going to 20 different sites, with different programming styles/patterns, just to get back up to speed. So you visit "site a" for some beginner tutorials, then "site b" for the intermediate stuff, finally "site c" for the more complex and obscure topics. So if you intend to have a good amount of tutorials, I say hell yeah. Even if it's just a few beginner tutorials, well, we have that much more tutorial goodness!

The site looks good, your content (I checked out "Windows Tutorial 1") is very clean, and I have yet to see a beginner tutorial like that, that had visual references to things, such as the icons. Very nifty.

[lonewolff]

Thanks for kind comments.

I certainly try to write things making the assumption that the end user has no previous knowledge in the area and then build upon that. So, once someone gets to tutorial 10 (for example) then the knowlegde gained from tutorials 1 - 9 should suffice, without confusing the programmer.

I certainly plan on keeping at it. I allready have another tutorial on the way, which should be up (hopefully) tonight, being the second 'Basic Windows' tutorial. I allready have 5 winsock tutorials posted.

I would even like to add some Ogre tutorials for Win32. As you know there have been countless forums posts here about 'how do I use a win32 window to render Ogre'.
I am even planning on going through with how to use Windows input handlers, to give people who are not familar with input, another alternative to OIS. Meaning no additional dll's to ship etc. (Disclamer: Dont get me wrong, I love OIS. PJcast has done an awesome job. So, no flamewars please - it is about alternatives )

[Wretched_Wyx]

Good idea about doing an Ogre+Win32 tutorial in there, would be very welcome. Have to agree- I too love OIS, it has been the defacto input lib for some time now. But alternatives are always great, and as you say, the benefit of one less DLL is always a good thing. Though things such as joystick support, etc might get a bit hairy, but then that's up to the user, and the point of alternatives!

[tuan kuranes]

Great Idea !

Site Remarks :
- stock photo, schema, any visual you can add so that it's more readable would ease readability
- no Rss ?
- print/pdf export (white and black inverted)
- tutorials comments ?

Subject remarks:

- visual c coding tips section (or mingw, cbb) like useful shortcut keys, 'themes', build system and/or any option. (property macros is widely unknow for instance)
- Winsock is a nice first Idea. I would guess that next most requested on forum, next is window transparency, or/and non rectangular window, renderless (1x1 renderwindow + RTT) render,
- some tools tutorial/review ? (visual assist, pc lint and visual lint, splint, profilers (vtune, code analyst), bouml, cvs/svn/git, etc.)

[lonewolff]

Hi, tuan kuranes.
I have been thinking of adding RSS but havent really gotten into how to implement it, and to be honest I didn't realise there would be a demand for it.
Also, I have been toying with the idea of producing a PDF download for each tutorial. I think it would be cool to make a mini-book even.
Tutorial comments is also a great idea, but at this stage I figured the actual content should take focus. But, it is something I would like to do - time permitting.

BTW, I have just listed another Windows tutorial

[lonewolff]

Yet, another tutorial has been posted.
I have now gone into how to use edit boxes, buttons, and other GUI assets. So, the 'Win32 newbies' out there can now make a half usable application.

http://www.win32developer.com/tutorial/ ... ial_3.shtm

What a brain-strain it is, to get all of this stuff into an understandable order.

Hats off to Sinbad, for maintaining and updating such a massive site! Mine is tiny in comparison and it still takes a huge amount of effort!

[Praetorian]

Looks good, (very clear and easy to follow) I'd never really bothered to learn all that win32 stuff, definitely something to boomark for a rainy day.

[betajaen]

Actually, that's a pretty awesome and well written website. I've never touched MFC before but it makes me want to.

[lonewolff]

That makes two of us.

As far as I know I haven't used any MFC.

[Nauk]

I just read through one of the tutorials - good work, easy to understand and nicely explained

[Azgur]

Noted something in the winsock tutorials, "Library files: wsock32.h". You might want to change that .h into .lib.
Otherwise really useful and straight to the point.

[lonewolff]

Well spotted Azgur

I'll fix that up right now. It was prbobably one of my last night missions

[lonewolff]

It has been a massive weekend of updates!

I have now posted tutorials on how newbies can setup their IDE to make the tutorials compile 1st time everytime.

I have also posted two Async Winsock tutorials (Server and Client) which combine to form a Windows GUI based chat program. The awesome-ness about this model is that we can rely on windows messages to hande communication between the server and client.

I remember using this a couple of years ago to make a basic networked ogre app.

I even now have a massive 8 forum members!

[Azgur]

Some more feedback, I had quite some headaches with including winsock2.h, instead just including windows.h should do the trick.
You might want to test this yourself, but it prevented quite a few annoyances for me.

edit: never mind this, I was being silly and windows.h will provide winsock.h instead of winsock2.h
edit2: I figured out what the real pitfall is, You need to include winsock2.h before including windows.h, or define WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN before including windows.h.

[lonewolff]

Yes, I found the same thing. Thats why I had included winsock2.h before the eindows.h header

I went with winsock2.h because the there was something that was required in my earlier tutorials that winsock.h didn't have. I think it was the error code defines, but I would have to go back and look.

[lonewolff]

Man, has it been that long since I posted a Winsock tutorial?

Well, good news for anyone still interested.

I have just posted tutorial 8 of my Winsock series. This tutorial helps answer to common question - 'how do I accept multiple clients?'. At the end of it you will have a working Win32 GUI based Asyncronous Winsock server capable of recieving as many clients as you like (Hardware, RAM, and bandwicth permitting - of course).

I have tested it with 100 dummy clients and am able to send messages to each with no noticable delay (on a LAN).

So for anyone interested - here's the link.

Accepting multiple connections

As always, I love any form of feedback

[lonewolff]

I am in the process of changing the style of the page to make it more interesting. I felt the mono gray was starting to get boring.

Let us know what you think