Welcome to Sams Teach Yourself Visual C++ 6 in 21 Days. Over the next three weeks, you will learn how to build a wide variety of applications with Microsoft's Visual C++. What's even better is that you will learn how to create these types of applications by actually building them yourself. As you read this book, you will be gaining actual programming experience using Visual C++. So let's get started! Today, your focus will be on learning about the Visual C++ development environment and some of the tools that it provides for building applications. Although Visual C++ provides more tools than you would probably use in any one application development effort--even more than you could possibly learn to use in a single day--I limit the focus to the primary tools that you will use throughout this book, as well as in just about every application you build with Visual C++. Today, you'll learn about the following: * The primary areas of the Visual C++ development environment * The Application Wizard--how you can use it to build the basic infrastructure for your applications * The Dialog Painter--how you can use it to paint dialog windows, much in the same way that you can build windows with Visual Basic, PowerBuilder, or Delphi * The Class Wizard--how you can use it to attach functionality to your application windows