Comment Feed for Channel 9 - Gordon Hogenson: Documenting Development Technologies http://ecn.channel9.msdn.com/o9/previewImages/100/249368_100x75.jpg Channel 9 - Gordon Hogenson: Documenting Development Technologies Gordon Hogenson is the Visual C++ Documentation Manager; he has worked as a technical writer and test engineer for Visual C++, C# and other Microsoft products for the past 9 years. He has avid interests in many diverse fields, including botany and organic gardening, chemistry, physics, metaphysics and philosophy. en Sat, 25 May 2013 01:40:10 GMT Sat, 25 May 2013 01:40:10 GMT Rev9 Re: Gordon Hogenson: Documenting Development Technologies

I think it's good to harc back to the unmanged world once in a while. I havent lived in the land of native since around 2001 but, recently I did a project in C++ and ran into an annoying problem in creating a BSTR from a string that was already in a BSTR-esque format (Apparently Apple has something similiar that they propogate to their Windows APIs). Embarassingly and much to my dismay, it took about 3 days to solve what should have/would have been nearly obvious and instant (although I wasnt able to use a debugger, it was a plugin). But the entire time it felt somewhat like I had a labotomy (or, what I imagine a labotomy must be like), dazed and confused.

-Brian A.

posted by BloomingVision

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/Gordon-Hogenson-Documenting-Development-Technologies#c633151942900000000 Sat, 19 May 2007 17:58:10 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/Gordon-Hogenson-Documenting-Development-Technologies#c633151942900000000 BloomingVision Re: Gordon Hogenson: Documenting Development Technologies "">http://ms.com/concepts/wpf-3d>")... you could do a lot of cool things with that.

-Brian

posted by BloomingVision

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/Gordon-Hogenson-Documenting-Development-Technologies#c633151951570000000 Sat, 19 May 2007 18:12:37 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/Gordon-Hogenson-Documenting-Development-Technologies#c633151951570000000 BloomingVision Re: Gordon Hogenson: Documenting Development Technologies
Technical topics tend to be covered in workplace literature as if books need to be great tomes of wisdom.  Vast swaths of knowledge and experience are treated in depth.  Usually, a minimum of 900 pages is required. 

So, I was trying to create a managed wrapper written in C# to implement a C++ call to a Win32 API subroutine that gives the program a special privilege.  Bah humbug:  HRESULT.  Of course, such a function should have a managed equivalent, but not yet.  Using P/INVOKE, this should be rather simple.  But it isn't if you cannot immediately get your hands on the decorations that must be put in the C++ function header.  It took Product Support Services several days to correctly identify the decorations.  Something this basic should not be buried in musings on how Microsoft actually implemented versus how they should have implemented something.  In my experience, there is no distinction between practical and vital information versus trivia in technical books.  One must thoroughly plow the books to find the nuggets if they be in the book; something that is not guaranteed.

For anyone who is interested, the following is an example of the correct decoration:

extern "C" _declspec(dllexport)  int _stdcall  yBHGQ95Y83Srg76sd24bkVZZ(int togglePosition)

posted by earnshaw

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/Gordon-Hogenson-Documenting-Development-Technologies#c633152901640000000 Sun, 20 May 2007 20:36:04 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/Gordon-Hogenson-Documenting-Development-Technologies#c633152901640000000 earnshaw Re: Gordon Hogenson: Documenting Development Technologies
I went ahead and passed on the suggestion to one of the PMs who heads up the Wiki project.  If you have some additional ideas on the cool things that could be done, I'd be happy to pass those along as well...Smiley

posted by gordonhogenson

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/Gordon-Hogenson-Documenting-Development-Technologies#c633154640900000000 Tue, 22 May 2007 20:54:50 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/Gordon-Hogenson-Documenting-Development-Technologies#c633154640900000000 gordonhogenson Re: Gordon Hogenson: Documenting Development Technologies
If you do need P/Invoke, you might check out www.pinvoke.net.  While it's not yet complete, it contains a wiki-like library of various P/Invoke API calls that other people have already figured out.  A great timesaver!

posted by gordonhogenson

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/Gordon-Hogenson-Documenting-Development-Technologies#c633154643490000000 Tue, 22 May 2007 20:59:09 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/Gordon-Hogenson-Documenting-Development-Technologies#c633154643490000000 gordonhogenson Re: Gordon Hogenson: Documenting Development Technologies http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=299490

Anand..


posted by Anand Raman [MSFT]

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/Gordon-Hogenson-Documenting-Development-Technologies#c633160186560000000 Tue, 29 May 2007 06:57:36 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/Gordon-Hogenson-Documenting-Development-Technologies#c633160186560000000 Anand Raman [MSFT]