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Tutorial 10
A Case Study:
The Service API |
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The following article was originally published in my column in Pinnacle's Visual Basic Developer Newsletter It is such a perfect case study for this book that I decided to reprint it here, even though some of you may have read it in the original form. This tutorial requires Windows NT. |
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API functions rarely stand alone. |
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This book has focused almost entirely on how you can work with individual API functions using Visual Basic. The problem of figuring out how the various API functions work and what you can do with them is largely left up to you. Between my book Visual Basic Programmer's Guide to the Win32 API for the core API functions and the Microsoft documentation for everything else, you have a rich set of documentation to draw on. I will concede that the Microsoft documentation sometimes does border on the inscrutable, but for many situations, it is all that is available. |
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This tutorial presents a case study of how you might approach the Microsoft documentation to solve a specific task that requires use of multiple API functions across an entire subsystem. I'll begin with a discussion of a real problem I faced, then walk you through the entire process, including the implementation of a complete solution. |
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Okay, I know there is no such word as ''pastward," but Microsoft's acronym for Active Server Pages is ASP, not ASB, so I couldn't use "A Step Backward," which is a much more fitting heading. I could, of course, have just selectively capitalized a heading such as "A Step into the Past," but making up a new word seemed much more fun. Besides, if Microsoft's acronym labs can continue to spew forth new acronyms and buzz words at the rate that they do, the least I can do is invent a new word now and then. |
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