This is one of those questions that I see pop up now and again and every time I do it amazes me. With all the high level programming languages available that can aid you in creating powerful windows applications with the minimum knowledge I always wonder – why on earth would you want to program in binary?

Well the truth is a lot of people are curious as to how it works, it can be very rewarding making something work with the lowest possible code available, and you can’t get any more basic than binary. But before you even attempt this you need to realize what you’re letting yourself in for:

• Your attention to detail has to be nothing short of amazing. If you get a zero or one the wrong way round your code will not work.
• Carrying on from the above point, if your code doesn’t work how do you plan on bug finding? You are presented with a string of 1′s and 0′s so be prepared for some painstaking work to find and fix bugs.
• Don’t even plan on writing anything of any decent size; it could take you days to code anything that is compilable.
• You won’t be able to segment your code; you will literally just have a big string of 1′s and 0′s, remember that!

If you are crazy enough to go ahead with this then you’re going to need a solid understand of bits, bytes, binary and hex. You can write your code in any text editor of your choice (preferably a basic one that won’t apply any kind of formatting or extras.).

What you will need to do then is write the code to either a file or a disk. How do you do this? Honestly I do not know and couldn’t find an answer either. It may be possible to convert your binary string into hex. You can then use a program called MPLAB that should allow you to view the hex file as x86 assembly, which can then be compiled into an executable.

Obviously it all depends on what your intended purpose is, but either way be prepared for some serious headaches!