from Glowdot Code by Rick Strom " if you start with Win32, you will have very little problem moving to MFC or .NET, since they just simplify the process."
Target the parts of your applications that take the most time, by Martyn Honeyford "Improving the performance of your applications is rarely a wasted effort, but it's not always clear which functions the program is spending most of its execution time on. Learn how to pinpoint performance bottlenecks using gprof for both user-space and system calls on Linux®."