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"Team Ada: Ada Advocacy Issues (83 & 95)" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:
From:
"Crispen, Bob" <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Tue, 18 Jul 2000 07:44:59 -0500
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"Crispen, Bob" <[log in to unmask]>
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Tom Moran[SMTP:[log in to unmask]] sez:

> >"STANDARDS.
> >
> >Clearly defined and agreed-upon conventions for programming
> >intefaces. Standards may be (bullets mine)
>
>   Can someone please point me to the clearly defined standards for the
> Windows API?
>
ftp://ftp.cs.virginia.edu/pub/lcc-win32/win32hlp.exe
(it's 12MB, compressed, so be prepared for a long
wait if you have a slow connection).  You can find that
helpfile other places on the net as well; I just happened
to have this URL handy, having downloaded a new copy
of lcc yesterday.

You'll also find it in the Platform SDK HTML help files,
e.g., win32.chm and shelcc.chm (to pick two of the more
useful ones).  And Petzold's book (which is published by
Microsoft Press).

If you're intending to claim that Microsoft doesn't document
their API thoroughly, I think you'll find a lot of skepticism.

Mind you, I have 2 or 3 books open on the desk and 2 or
3 windows open on my computer whenever I do something
I haven't done before in Windows -- they aren't the greatest
at organizing their documents, but it's all there if you can
figure out where to find it.

Btw, apart from Petzold's book which is relatively cheap,
all the other sources of information I mentioned are free
and available to people who haven't bought Visual Studio.

This is in sharp contrast to, e.g., the IEEE specs, which are
never freely available (and always, imho, aggravatingly
expensive), but are standards nonetheless.

Microsoft could charge whatever they like for their standards
and support documentation, and the fact that they publish
them freely on the net (or cheaply on CDs and dead trees)
does credit to their good intentions -- and good business sense.
If all the people developing for Windows wake up tomorrow
morning and decide to develop for Linux instead, Microsoft is
screwed, so they do their very best to treat their developers
right.

Are there "secret" APIs that only Microsoft people know about?
Yup.  Would you ever want to use them in an application
program?  Nope.  Unless you're developing an AdaScript
interpreter for Excel ;-)

Bob Crispen
[log in to unmask]

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