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These frameworks are the future of speed internet. But I can't find any benchmark or feature comparison of them on google. What framework in which situation would be better for example for building highload online shop? For building stackoverflow clone?
Maybe some basic memory management and request handling differences explanation, please?
Though the official documentation links to techempower, ChicagoBoss is not mentioned anywhere. Looking closely at ChicagoBoss it seems to be targeted mostly at Erlang developers, which is not the most popular language out there. I'm a fanatical about Phalcon, but I feel that ChicagoBoss would be faster and more resource efficient out of the box. But… writing your entire app in binary code right away would be even better in that sense.
Phalcon in less than two years achieved bigger popularity and reputation than ChicagoBoss did in five. There is significantly more information and support out there for Phalcon given all standard PHP rules and information apply to it as well. Phalcon next big release is under active development and looks very promising.
What framework in which situation would be better for example for
building highload online shop? For building stackoverflow clone?
I'm certain that neither Amazon or SO use either of them but both rely on a lot of caching and infrastructure optimisation to get where they are – the job for a different type framework.
Phalcon is a great lightweight tool for building unique projects with focus on high performance. It behaves very nicely with PhpStorm and the development / debugging is a pleasure most of the time. But be sure, it will give a lot of headache (there are a few bugs and some information is hard to come by) – isn't the best choice for enterprise software, you will spend a lot of time figuring out how things work and how to fix some of them.
I've spent the better part of my morning and afternoon playing around with GUI frameworks in Haskell, as I need some visualization and interaction capabilities and I'm not in love with writing my core functionality in Haskell then piping out to a front end written in another GUI; I'd prefer to do it all from one language. The better part of that better part has been spent compiling and patching source code, or Googling obscure compilation errors.
I've spent plenty of time reading SO questions, plenty of time on haskell.org, and plenty of time reading documentation. What I've encountered is a very large swath of outdated or poorly documented information. I can boil it down to these three things:
A glut of options built on top of Gtk+ bindings. I don't care for Gtk+ very much, mostly because I find it to be quite unpleasant to look at, especially on OS X. Griping about the UI looking out of place and/or just plain ugly might seem silly, but that's important to me. Especially if I want other people to utilize any of the programs that I create.
wxHaskell, which is stable and incredibly easy to install but many of the existing tutorials seem to be for wx-0.1x and the conventions for bridging the wxWidgets 2.9.x docs to wx-0.90.x are very very spotty and hard to grok, when they even exist.
qtHaskell, which seems to be mostly abandoned (correct me if I'm wrong), only compiles with newer versions of GHC after applying a year-old patch, and spits out a massive amount of warnings that indicate they will soon become compile errors in newer versions of GHC.
In effect, I'm looking for Haskell's answer to Java's Swing; a library that is robust, maintained, well documented, easy to get started with, makes an attempt to be native in look and feel, can keep up with GHC's development pace, and not at high risk for abandonment. This seems to be exactly zero GUI frameworks, but then it seems that most of the "official" resources/wikis/pages/docs related to GUI frameworks are woefully unmaintained so I decided to turn to the community to see if there was something I just wasn't finding. I'm not terribly worried about the framework being cross platform, just so long as it works on modern versions of OS X.
To reiterate, I'm not really looking for someone to send me a link to haskell.org or the WikiBook. I've been there, and I didn't like what I saw. Most of the information there is just so out of date that it only creates more work, not less.
I realize that my "demands" are a little extreme, especially for a language with a smaller community like Haskell, but I was hoping that someone out there could be of assistance to me. In the mean time, I intend to simply try and ride out wxHaskell or qtHaskell until I succeed or die.
I hope I'm not coming across as gruff or frazzled.
wxHaskell is good, yes, and my go-to GUI middle level library. I admit there's been a focus on updating the code before the docs in the new version.
For modern, functional-reactive-programming fun stuff on top of it I gor for reactive banana, which is actively maintained, and has the added benefit that Heinrich Apfelmus himself may well turn up here to answer your questions.
Threepenny-gui is the most recent contender in the space of Haskell GUI libraries.
Its main selling point is that it is very easy to install, because it uses the web browser as a display. It's also easy to get started with.
On the other hand, it doesn't even attempt to have a native look and feel – the UI is built solely on HTML. (This may change in the future, as we have the option of using XUL). Also, the API is still very much in flux, so be prepared that new major versions of the library are likely to break backwards compatibility. (On the other hand, this means that it's actively developed. :-))
(Disclosure: I'm the author / maintainer of the threepenny-gui package.)
I feel your pain; this answer is an attempt to provide some alternatives that may be good enough and perhaps help you with your search.
First, there is a language called Concurrent Clean. It is supposed to be similar to Haskell, has GUI support and is meant for writing real-world applications. It differs in some respects; for instance, its I/O is based on unique types rather than Monads, which as far as I'm concerned, is a good thing :). Here is a link:
http://wiki.clean.cs.ru.nl/Clean
Next, I dug around for a Haskell compiled to the JVM, in the hopes that it would piggy-back on the Java libraries, ala Clojure. No dice. What I did find was a SO thread discussing the lack and the challenges thereof:
Haskell on JVM?
From that thread however, two other options were brought up. One is Frege:
http://code.google.com/p/frege/
The other is CAL:
https://github.com/levans/Open-Quark
There's also work on functional reactive programming in Haskell. It's supposed to enable things like GUIs, although whether or not you'll actually get a GUI out of it is another matter:
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Functional_Reactive_Programming
It's sad. Here we have the JVM and .NET and yet zilch for Haskell. It's worse than that; .NET has shown an alarming tendency to ditch promising implementations. Whatever happened to IronScheme, IronLisp and IronHaskell? All dead as far as I can tell.
Not good :(
Microsoft has recently put a release of their Code Contracts framework on DevLabs with a commercial license. We're interested on using them in our project (mostly C#, some C++/CLI) to gradually replace all the custom validation code, but I'm keen to know about the experience other people have had with it before we commit to it, specifically:
Do you think the framework is sufficiently mature for large and complex commercial projects?
What problems have you run into while using it?
What benefits have you got from it?
Is it currently more pain than it's worth?
I realise that this is a somewhat subjective question as it requires opinion, but given that this framework is a very significant part of .NET 4.0 and will (potentially) change the way we all write validation code, I hope that this question will be left open to gather experience on the subject to help me make a decision to a specific, answerable question:
Should we be starting to use it next month?
Note that we do not ship a code API, only a web service one, so for the majority of code breaking compatibility in terms of the exception type thrown is not a concern. However, as I'm hoping more people than just me will benefit from this post and its answers, any detail around this area is more than welcome.
The last mature response to this was in 2009, and .NET 4 is out. I figure we're due for an update:
Code Contracts might well be mature enough for your Debug releases.
I realise this is somewhat of an upgrade from “Harmless” to “Mostly Harmless”.
The Code Contracts home page links to quite thorough documentation in PDF format. The documentation outlines usage guidelines in section 5. To summarize, you can pick how brave you feel about the Contract Tools re-writing your IL in your Release builds.
We're using the “don't rewrite my Release IL” mode.
So far, I'm most enjoying this unexpected benefit: there's less code, thus less code to test. All your guard clauses melt away.
if(arg != null) {
throw new ArgumentNullException("arg");
}
// Blank line here insisted upon by StyleCop
becomes:
Contract.Requires(arg != null);
Your functions are shorter. Your intent is clearer. And, you no longer have to write a test named ArgumentShouldNotBeNull just to reach 100% coverage.
So far, I've run into two problems:
I had a unit test which relied on a contract failure to succeed. You might argue the existence of the test was a blunder, but I wanted to document this particular prohibition in the form of a test. The test failed on my build server because I didn't have the tools installed. Solution: install the tools.
We're using two tools that rewrite IL: Code Contracts and PostSharp. They didn't get along too well. PostSharp's 2.0.8.1283 fixed the problem. I'd cautiously evaluate how any two IL-rewriting tools get along, though.
So far, the benefits are outweighing the hazards.
Addressing out-of-date concerns raised in other answers:
Code Contracts's documentation is quite thorough, though regrettably in PDF.
There's at least one Code Contract forum hosted by Microsoft.
Code Contracts Standard Edition is free if you have any VS2010 license.
.NET 4 is out. I've run into Microsoft's contracts when implementing generic collection interfaces.
I've been playing around with the code contracts some more myself on a small but moderately complex standalone project, which needs to inherit from some BCL classes and use other ones.
The contracts thing seems great when you're working in a completely isolated environment with just your own code and primitive types, but as soon as you start using BCL classes (which until .NET 4.0 do not have their own contracts) the verifier cannot check whether they will violate any of the requires/ensures/invariants and so you get a lot of warnings about potentially unsatisfied constraints.
On the other hand, it does find some invalid or potentially unsatisfied constraints which could be real bugs. But it's very hard to find these because there is so much noise that it's hard to find out which ones you can fix. It's possible to suppress the warnings from the BCL classes by using the assume mechanism, but this is somewhat self-defeating as these classes will have contracts in the future and assumptions will lessen their worth.
So my feeling is that for now, because in 3.5 we're trying to build on a framework that the verifier does not sufficiently understand, that it's probably worth waiting for 4.0.
Judging by this thread I would say it is not quite mature enough to use for an enterprise level project. I haven't used it myself, but people are still running into bugs that would bring your contract-critical project to a halt. It seems like a really great framework and the example videos they've provided have been exciting, but I'd wait for:
Existence of a community forum. You're going to want to be able to discuss inevitable problems you run into with other developers, and you want to know there is a decently strong base of developers out there to discuss solutions with.
A successful pilot project release. Generally, when Microsoft Research releases something that they think is mature enough to be used in a commercial project, they will work with an organization to pilot it, and then release that project open source to as a proof of concept and trial-by-fire of all of the major features. This would give a lot of confidence that most of the common contract scenarios are covered and working.
More complete documentation. Plain and simple, at some point you're going to want to do something with contracts that you can't do yet using Microsoft Code Contracts. You want to be able to quickly and clearly reason that your scenario is not yet supported. The current documentation is going to keep you guessing and trying different things, though, in my opinion, which will result in a lot of wasted time.
It's not mature enough.
It will be as soon as Microsoft releases it with the affordable editions of VS, but without the static code analysis it's not usable at all.
The editions of VS, that have it, are so insanely expensive that only a handful of people will ever be able to afford it.
It's a shame Microsoft killed this amazing idea with their pricing policy. I wish Code Contracts would become mainstream, but they won't.
Epic fail.
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I was certain that somebody would have specifically asked this question, but from what I can see no-one has (there's been a question about learning win32 but that doesn't cover whether it's worthwhile doing so).
I am very interested in gaining a deeper understanding of all the systems I use (I mostly program in C#, at least professionally), so I wondered, very simply - is learning win32 worthwhile, or is it overkill? Am I wasting my time? Is the knowledge I'd gain worth the effort?
Similar / related questions on StackOverflow:
Does it still make sense to learn low level WinAPI programming?
How relevant is Win32 programming to modern professionals?
Having a working knowledge of how Win32 works at the lowest level will certainly be invaluable if you are planning on doing Windows development in the future. It gives you a level of insight into things like Windows, Messaging and GDI that are hidden by the time you get to the level of .NET.
I wouldn't recommend you try and use Win32 for writing all your applications, but I feel that any Windows developer would benefit from writing a simple Win32 application using C/C++.
This is less true for things like WPF where there is less dependency on Win32, but just knowing how Win32 works will help you understand or appreciate some of the design decisions in WPF.
I advocate learning the concepts behind low level windows programming if all of the following are true.
You are going to do any windows programming.
You want to be the "go to" guy when the unexplainable happens.
You love to learn.
Abstraction layers like .NET work create and allow developers to do incredible things without having to know a lot. However, when .NET is used in a way unanticipated by its authors which reveals one of its subtle bugs, then that is the time where some win32 API knowledge goes a long way.
Will you ever have to write a message pump? I doubt it. Can it help diagnose problems? You betcha!
The question is much like, "Is learning assembly worthwhile"; and the answer is the same:
"Yes, because you will understand the fundamentals, and be able to perceive deeper than those who only work at the top level of abstraction".
However, by the same token, you probably won't be writing Win32 API directly 99.5% of the time.
When they invented C to replace assembly language, people where probably asking: "is it worthwhile to learn assembly language?" The value in knowing both was being able to drop to assembly to do the things which were impossible to accomplish in C (eg. trigger an interrupt).
The same can be said for Win32. There are some things which are impossible to do in C#. If you didn't know the win32 api, then you would dismiss some things as being impossible. However, once you know what you are missing, in those rare situations, you would be able to "drop to win32" and do them.
Another way of looking at it is this: programming is all about being able to think in multiple levels of abstraction at the same time. For example, if you know your language uses immutable strings, you don't write an algorithm that adds a single character to one 10000 times, because it will be slow. If you know the win32 api, you will be able to think about how each line you write in C# is actually implemented and that will help you write better code.
At least for me, learning an API (I'm assuming that "in-depth" is implied) that I don't use is a waste of time. I'd rather spend my limited amount of time and brain power learning new concepts or exploring new tools than becoming intimately familiar with an existing tool that I don't need to use now. When I need a particular tool that I don't have or have to use a tool that I'm not familiar with, that's the time to learn it in some depth. Before that I might do enough investigation to know whether it is going to be useful to me or not, but not much more.
Yes, the principles of the Win32 API are useful to learn - these principles are the foundation on which everything else is built.
The .NET APIs for GUI development, both Windows.Forms and WPF, do what they do within the constraints of what is possible on top of the Win32 API. Key architectural decisions of these frameworks were constrained and informed by the Win32 API.
On the other hand, you are less likely to get a lot of value from diving deep into the API, as there is a lot to learn, and given that you spend most of your time working in C#, you'll have less opportunity to use the knowledge directly.
BTW, the same applies to other technologies as well - like networking, cryptography and hardware design. Learning the fundamentals will help you become a better developer.
Yes, you should learn the basics of how Windows (a lot of this stuff predates Win32) operates. Why? For the same reason as I understand how a mortise and tenon joint operates, even though I don't make my own furniture, or why I understand how an internal combustion engine works even though I don't do my own car maintenance.
You work at a higher level of abstraction, which is nice, but when that abstraction leaks - that's not an "if", that's a "when" - if you don't understand the basics of Windows, you'll be lost. If you don't know at least some of the API, you won't have a clue where to look if you need to P/Invoke functionality not available in .Net.
Quite apart from that, isn't curiousity reason enough?
If you are trying to write a VB6 application then the Win32 API allows you to do a lot of things that are not natively supported by VB6.
If you're writing a C# WinForms app then I would recommend learning the vast reaches of the .NET Framework first.
Edit
If you really want to know what's going on under the hood in Windows then you might want to check out a copy of Programming Windows 3.1 by Charles Petzold.
I personally think it's still worthwhile learning the Win32 API.
As far as I recall when I started learning Win32 (after doing some VB(A), Pascal, etc.) I learned a lot about Windows and understood how thing works in Windows. Everything was so clearer. :)
So, as per your question - you will learn a lot about Windows through learning Win32.
As you said - you're a C# programmer and I'm not sure if you'll use it often, because almost everything you need is already there, in .NET.
I won't repeat over and over what the others said many times already.
Here's a link to a Win32 tutorial with which I am currently learning along the basics of Win32's. I find it pretty interesting and easy to follow.
This tutorial helps me get what I didn't understand first, back when I've begun to program in my secondary school years.
If I were to start today, I wouldn't learn the entire API. However, I do think that the basic concepts are important to understand, with an understanding of how message loops work as the top priority.
You'll never be able to just "learn" the entire win32 API, it's too much to take in, and it will be a moving target. If you develop in C#, there's no real point.
That said, try creating Notepad using plain C and just API calls. That will teach you enough for a C# developer to at least appreciate it.
A lot of the "No" answers here seem to focus on learning the actual methods, structs, and what not available in the API. I'd say yes, but focus not on the individual components of the API, but the overall design and the way it functions. It's much easier to troubleshoot even .NET code when you understand what's happening at the core level of the operating system.
This question looks a bit dated, but I'll answer anyway.
Answer: Complicated: yes. Simple: probably not necessary.
It really depends on what you need to do. If you need to use a feature not current supported by .NET, have-at-er. But be careful, most of the coddling the Framework provides Win32 does not, and if you do something incredibly stupid, your machine WILL bluescreen.
I know when .NET first came out, I had have no interest to learn Win32, .NET was here and it was such an improvement. But the sad fact about Windows is this: all new features in Windows are implemented in native code first, period. If you want to use any part of Windows before .NET wraps it, you're either using Win32 from C++ or Win32 from C# or from VB.NET. .NET is a wrapper, for all the stuff in Win32. So if you can't wait, yes, you can Interop into the lower bowels of the OS if you'd like.
Knowing Win32 and probably one day Win64 (whatever they happen to call it) will always be a useful skill. Any whizzbang technology requires underpinnings somewhere.
.NET is implemented using win32 api, anyone wishing to possess deeper understanding of .NET would greatly benefit from having at least marginal knowlege of win32api.
In your career it will be unlikely that you will only be creating greenfield applications where you will have the freedom to choose the technology and programming languages used.
Sooner or later you will have to integrate with old code written in Win32 and C/C++. In that case, knowledge of Win32 will help, especially if you are integrating using PInvoke or C++/CLI.
Misuse the .NET framework and Win32 and your machine will blue screen? Somehow I doubt that.
The biggest value to knowing Win32 (or assembly language) is that when something doesn't work as expected and you have to debug it. The more you know about the underlying system, the easier time you will have debugging the problem.
I like to further add to this. I never formally studied Win32 API/MFC. I started using Visual C++ 4 when I first got interested in GUI programming. Anyway, I wish I kept that foundation then, as I never caught on quick enough (I was rather young then, actually), so I studied Visual Basic instead.
For some reason, Delphi never interested me even though I knew Pascal well enough, but I digress. These days, I work in IT and develop installer scripts in NSIS - and every so often I need additional functionality that NSIS doesn't provide, so I make my own plugin and to keep it quick and dependency free, I opt for Win32 API opposed to MFC or even full blown C++.
The main reason for this comment, is that my own curiosity got me hooked. I like to know more, so where is the best resource for learning the API. A book? Website?
Would MFC still be worth tackling as well? I did see a website about a fellow that develops Win32 GUI apps, in assembly! I think that is overkill, honestly, but it is compact, fast code, interesting, the concept, but I never was able to get the hang of 80x86 assembly (hell, even RISC assembly in college I never was able to do!)
I think it's always interesting to know how a system works if your work relies on it. I don't mean you should learn every bit of it, but still get a good understanding, at least to be able to search more by yourself the day you will have to.
Software is not magic - well... ok... for 99% of the cases :-)
Here is a link to an excellent article about "magical thinking" and "GUID goblins" from Eric Lippert's about that subject: It's not Magic
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Closed 10 years ago.
Does it make sense, having all of the C#-managed-bliss, to go back to Petzold's Programming Windows and try to produce code w/ pure WinAPI?
What can be learn from it? Isn't it just too outdated to be useful?
This question is bordering on religious :) But I'll give my thoughts anyway.
I do see value in learing the Win32 API. Most, if not all, GUI libraries (managed or unmanaged) result in calls to the Win32 API. Even the most thorough libraries don't cover 100% of the API, and hence there are always gaps which need to be plugged by direct API calls or P/invoking. Some of the names of the wrappers around the API calls have similar names to the underlying API calls, but those names aren't exactly self-documenting. So understanding the underlying API, and the terminology used therein, will aid in understanding the wrapper APIs and what they actually do.
Plus, if you understand the nature of the underlying APIs that are used by frameworks, then you will make better choices with regards to which library functionality you should use in a given scenario.
Cheers!
I kept to standard C/C++ for years before learning Win32 API, and to be quite blunt, the "learning Win32 API" part is not the best technical experience of my life.
In one hand Win32 API is quite cool. It's like an extension of the C standard API (who needs fopen when you can have CreateFile. But I guess UNIX/Linux/WhateverOS have the same gizmo functions. Anyway, in Unix/Linux, they have the "Everything is a file". In Windows, they have the "Everything is a... Window" (no kidding! See CreateWindow!).
In the other hand, this is a legacy API. You will be dealing with raw C, and raw C madness.
Like telling one's structure its own size to pass through a void * pointer to some Win32 function.
Messaging can be quite confusing, too: Mixing C++ objects with Win32 windows lead to very interesting examples of Chicken or Egg problem (funny moments when you write a kind of delete this ; in a class method).
Having to subclass a WinProc when you're more familiar with object inheritance is head-splitting and less than optimal.
And of course, there is the joy of "Why in this fracking world they did this thing this way ??" moments when you strike your keyboard with your head once too many and get back home with keys engraved in your forehead, just because someone thought it more logical to write an API to enable the changing of the color of a "Window", not by changing one of its properties, but by asking it to its parent window.
etc.
In the last hand (three hands ???), consider that some people working with legacy APIs are themselves using legacy code styling. The moment you hear "const is for dummies" or "I don't use namespaces because they decrease the runtime speed", or the even better "Hey, who needs C++? I code in my own brand of object-oriented C!!!" (No kidding... In a professional environment, and the result was quite a sight...), you'll feel the kind of dread only condemned feel in front of the guillotine.
So... All in all, it's an interesting experience.
Edit
After re-reading this post, I see it could be seen as overly negative. It is not.
It is sometimes interesting (as well as frustrating) to know how the things work under the hood. You'll understand that, despite enormous (impossible?) constraints, the Win32 API team did wonderful work to be sure everything, from you "olde Win16 program" to your "last Win64 over-the-top application", can work together, in the past, now, and in the future.
The question is: Do you really want to?
Because spending weeks to do things that could be done (and done better) in other more high-level and/or object-oriented API can be quite de-motivational (real life experience: 3 weeks for Win API, against 4 hours in three other languages and/or libraries).
Anyway, you'll find Raymond Chen's Blog very interesting because of his insider's view on both Win API and its evolution through the years:
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/
Absolutely. When nobody knows the low level, who will update and write the high level languages? Also, when you understand the low level stuff, you can write more efficient code in a higher level language, and also debug more efficiently.
The native APIs are the "real" operating system APIs. The .NET library is (with few exceptions) nothing more than a fancy wrapper around them. So yes, I'd say that anybody who can understand .NET with all its complexity, can understand relatively mundane things like talking to the API without the benefit of a middle-man.
Just try to do DLL Injection from managed code. It can't be done. You will be forced to write native code for this, for windowing tweaks, for real subclassing, and a dozen other things.
So yes: you should (must) know both.
Edit: even if you plan to use P/Invoke.
On the assumption that you're building apps targeted at Windows:
it can sure be informative to understand lower levels of the system - how they work, how your code interacts with them (even if only indirectly), and where you have additional options that aren't available in the higher-level abstractions
there are times when your code might not be as efficient, high-performance or precise enough for your requirements
However, in more and more cases, folks like us (who never learned "unmanaged coding") will be able to pull off the programming we're trying to do without "learning" Win32.
Further, there's plenty of sites that provide working samples, code fragments and even fully-functional source code that you can "leverage" (borrow, plagiarize - but check that you're complying with any re-use license or copyright!) to fill in any gaps that aren't handled by the .NET framework class libraries (or the libraries that you can download or license).
If you can pull off the feats you need without messing around in Win32, and you're doing a good job of developing well-formed, readable managed code, then I'd say mastering .NET would be a better choice than spreading yourself thin over two very different environments.
If you frequently need to leverage those features of Windows that haven't received good Framework class library coverage, then by all means, learn the skills you need.
I've personally spent far too much time worrying about the "other areas" of coding that I'm supposed to understand to produce "good programs", but there's plenty of masochists out there that think everyone's needs and desires are like their own. Misery loves company. :)
On the assumption that you're building apps for the "Web 2.0" world, or that would be just as useful/beneficial to *NIX & MacOS users:
Stick with languages and compilers that target as many cross-platform environments as possible.
pure .NET in Visual Studio is better than Win32 obviously, but developing against the MONO libraries, perhaps using the Sharp Develop IDE, is probably an even better approach.
you could also spend your time learning Java, and those skills would transfer very well to C# programming (plus the Java code would theoretically run on any platform with the matching JRE). I've heard it said that Java is more like "write once, debug everywhere", but that's probably as true as (or even moreso than) C#.
Analogy: If you build cars for a living (programming), then its very pertinent to know how the engine works (Win32).
Simple answer, YES.
This is the answer to any question that is like.. "does it make sense to learn a low level language/api X even when a higher level language/api Y is there"
YES
You are able to boot up your Windows PC (or any other OS) and ask this question in SO because a couple of guys in Microsoft wrote 16-bit assembly code that loads your OS.
Your browser works because someone wrote an OS kernel in C that serves all your browser's requests.
It goes all the way up to scripting languages.
Big or small, there is always a market and opportunity to write something in any level of abstraction. You just have to like it and fit in the right job.
No api/language at any level of abstraction is irrelevent unless there is a better one competing at the same level.
Another way of looking at it: A good example from one of Michael Abrash's book: A C programmer was given the task of writing a function to clear the screen. Since C was a better (higher level) abstraction over assembly and all, the programmer only knew C and knew it well. He did his best - he moved the cursor to each location on the screen and cleared the character there. He optimized the loop and made sure it ran as fast as it could. But still it was slow... until some guy came in and said there was some BIOS/VGA instruction or something that could clear the screen instantly.
It always helps to know what you are walking on.
Yes, for a few reasons:
1) .net wraps Win32 code. .net is usually a superior system to code against, but having some knowledge of the underlying Win32 layer (oops, WinAPI now that there is 64-bit code too) bolsters your knowledge of what is really happening.
2) in this economy, it is better to have some advantages over the other guy when you are looking for a job. Some WinAPI experience may provide this for you.
3) some system aspects are not available through the .net framework yet, and if you want to access those features you will need to use p/invoke (see http://www.pinvoke.net for some help there). Having at least a smattering of WinAPI experience will make your p/invoke development effort a lot more efficient.
4) (added) Now that Win8 has been around for awhile, it is still built on top of the WinAPI. iOS, Android, OS/X, and Linux are all out there, but the WinAPI will still be out there for many many years.
Learning a new programming language or technology is for one of three reasons:
1. Need: you're starting a project for building a web application and you don't know anything about ASP.NET
2. Enthusiasm: you're very excited about ASP.NET MVC. why not try that?
3. Free time: but who has that anyway.
The best reason to learn something new is Need. If you need to do something that the .NET framework can't do (like performance for example) then WinAPI is your solution. Until then we keep ourself busy with learning about .NET
For most needs on the desktop you wont need to know the Win32, however there is a LOT of Win32 not in .NET, but it is in the outlaying stuff that may end up being less than 1% of your application.
USB support, HID support, Windows Media Foundation just off the top of my head. There are many cool Vista API's only available from Win32.
You will do yourself a large favor by learning how to do interop with a Win32 API, if you do desktop programing, because when you do need to call Win32, and you will, you won't spend weeks scratching your head.
Personally I don't really like the Win32 API but there's value in learning it as the API will allow more control and efficiency using the GUI than a language like Visual Basic, and I believe that if you're going to make a living writing software you should know the API even if you don't use it directly. This is for reasons similar to the reasons it's good to learn C, like how a strcpy takes more time than copying an integer, or why you should use pointers to arrays as function parameters instead of arrays by value.
Learning C or a lower level language can definitely be useful. However, I don't see any obvious advantage in using the unmanaged WinAPI.
I've seen low level Windows API code... it ain't pretty... I wish I could unlearn it. I think it benefits to learn low level as in C, as you gain a better understanding of the hardware architecture and how all that stuff works. Learning old Windows API... I think that stuff can be left to the people at Microsoft who may need to learn it to build higher level languages and API... they built it, let them suffer with it ;-)
However, if you happen to find a situation where you feel you just can't do what you need to do in a higher level language (few and far between), then perhaps start the dangerous dive into that world.
yes. take a look at uTorrent, an amazing piece of software efficiency. Half of it's small size is due to the fact that much of it's core components were re-written to not use gargatuian libraries.
Much of this couldn't be done without understanding how these libraries interface with the lower level API's
It's important to know what is available with the Windows API. I don't think you need to crank out code with it, but you should know how it works. The .NET Framework contains a lot of functionality, but it doesn't provide managed code equivalents for the entire Windows API. Sometimes you have to get a bit closer to the metal, and knowing what's down there and how it behaves will give you a better understanding of how to use it.
This is really the same as the question, should I learn a low level language like C (or even assembler).
Coding in it is certainly slower (though of course the result is much faster), but its true advantage is you gain an insight into what is happening at close to the system level, rather than than just understanding someone else's metaphor for what is going on.
It can also be better when things won't work well, or fast enough or with the sort of granularity that you need. (And do at least some subclassing and superclassing.)
I'll put it this way. I don't like programming to the Win32 API. It can be a pain compared to managed code. BUT, I'm glad I know it because I can write programs that otherwise I wouldn't be able to. I can write programs that other people can't. Plus it gives you more insight into what your managed code is doing behind the scenes.
The amount of value you get out of learning the Win32 API, (aside from the sorts of general insights you get from learning about how the nuts and bolts of the machine fit together) depends on what you're trying to achieve. A lot of the Win32 API has been wrapped nicely in .NET library classes, but not all of it. If for instance you're looking to do some serious audio programming, that portion of the Win32 API would be an excellent subject of study because only the most basic of operations are available from .NET classes. Last I checked even the managed DirectX DirectSound library was awful.
At the risk of shameless self-promotion....
I just came across a situation where the Win32 API was my only option. I want to have different tooltips on each item in a listbox. I wrote up how I did it on this question.
Even in very very high level languages you still make use of the API. Why? Well not every aspect of the API has been replicated by the various libraries, frameworks, etc. You need to learn the API for as long as you will need the API to accomplish what you are trying to do. (And no longer.)
Apart from some very special cases when you need direct access to APIs, I would say NO.
There is considerable time and effort required to learn to implement the native API calls correctly and the returning value is just not worth it. I would rather spend the time learning some new hot technology or framework that will make your life easier and programming less painful. Not decades-old obsolete COM libraries that nobody really uses anymore (sorry to COM users).
Please don't stone me for this view. I know a lot of engineers here have really curious souls and there is nothing wrong with learning how things work. Curiousity is good and really helps understanding. But from a managerial point of view, I would rather spend a week learning how to develop Android apps than how to calls OLEs or COMs.
If you planning to develop a cross platform application, If you use win32, then your application could easily run on linux through WINE. This results in a highly maintainable application. This is one of the advantages of learning win32.