About Charles Petzold: Charles Petzold is an American programmer and technical author on Microsoft Windows applications. He is also a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional and was named one of Microsoft's seven Windows Pioneers.
Code is not like other how-computers-work books. It doesn't have big color illustrations of disk drives with arrows showing how the data sweeps into the computer. Code has no drawings of trains carrying a cargo of zeros and ones. Metaphors and simile...
Blend is great for designers because it implements a lot of sophisticated behaviours, but for what I like to do, hand coding XAML is preferable, particularly because I have to publish it.
I started out with machine code and assembly language.
Some programs - especially games - require that your system be set to a particular color depth and resolution. Often such special settings are different from your usual mode, though.
Computer monitors can operate in many different video modes. In most cases, the decision about how many pixels and colors to display is yours - but not always.
MIDI made a natural transition to the PC. The MIDI messages that make up a musical composition can be saved as MIDI files, which are collections of MIDI messages with timing information.
All modern MIDI synthesizers are capable of polyphony, which means they can play more than one note at a time and more than one instrument at a time.
Many MIDI files contain entire musical compositions. Because MIDI supports only 16 channels, however, no more than 16 different instruments can play at any time, and one of those is the key-based percussion instrument.
I felt more like a scientist exploring nature, and Windows was my environment. You don't pass judgment on nature; you just explain how it works.
A MIDI file contains coded instructions to play a particular series of notes on an electronic music synthesizer. A MIDI file is more like a piano roll in a player piano than any type of sound recording.
I really liked figuring things out on my own. Early on in the development of a new version of Windows, I would explore it, I would try out various things, I would see what worked, I would see what didn't work.
