> "Too bad win32 is such a finicky and verbose API that's painful to use for anything beyond the simplest of dialogs. I tried. The MSDN documentation doesn't quite cut it. TheOldNewThing by Raymond Chen is a must-read to get it right."

If it's helpful, I'd like to mention that Charles Petzold's "Programming Windows" has been pretty much the reference for writing Win32 apps since the '90s. (It's the same person that wrote "Code" and "The Annotated Turing".) You probably want the 5th edition as that's the last pure Win32 version; the 6th edition seems to be oriented towards C# based WinRT apps.