I always thought that the whole WinMain() thing was an ugly mistake. The right way to do this would be to organise the libraries and startup code so that the simplest Windows GUI program was not 50 or 100 lines of boilerplate, but was instead something like;
At least they provide the mainCRTStartup thing [1] so you can use main() in GUI executables. Regarding boilerplate, Win32 was designed as a very low level API, with MFC and other high level libraries to make things easier.
I didn't know about the mainCRTStartup thing, thanks. But it should have been the default - to me WinMain() is just a failure to understand what is best exposed and what is best encapsulated. My boilerplate reduction proposal is to provide a few helper functions to optionally avoid exposure to some of the pipework - just to make life a bit easier when starting out. MFC on the other hand is a massive new layer of compromises and other crud slapped over the top of the Win32 API - somehow managing to make it even more cryptic (YMMV). Also MFC postdated the Win32 API by a few years, so presumably wasn't considered as the first choice solution at the start. The first Petzold book was a C thing, MFC and C++ came later.
If by "boilerplate" you mean creating/registering a window class before creating a window, you don't need to do that if your application's UI largely looks like dialogboxes - DialogBoxParam will create a message loop automatically and all you need to give it is the layout template and the message calback WndProc.
(I've been working with Win32 for around a decade now, it's got its warts but really isn't that bad once you get used to it. You can do a lot of interesting things with it.)
Sure I am not arguing about the whole of Win32, just the fact that it would have been easy to modify the API a bit so that main() was the entry point for a normal windows app.
It's done like that in C# (for WinForms, at least).
namespace WindowsFormsApplication1
{
static class Program
{
/// <summary>
/// The main entry point for the application.
/// </summary>
[STAThread]
static void Main()
{
Application.EnableVisualStyles();
Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault(false);
Application.Run(new Form1());
}
}
