"Piske, Harald" wrote: > I certainly agree, although complexity seems to be unavoidable with > flexibility. My approach is to really fight for the time to go over ALL the > functions once briefly, so that when I need a certain functionality, I have > a better chance to vaguely remember where there was something.
Sure, if you can learn a little about everything, that's great. But a focused search leads to many dead ends. It would be extremely helpful, for example, if things like BringWindowToTop were documented to do only what they actually do, which appears to be to manipulate only windows within a particular application, rather than system wide. There is no cross-reference to the similar functions needed to do the equivalent system wide operation, and no clue that the operation only applies to a single application. Certainly flexibility results in complexity. But there could be one API for the functionality, with a flag to indicate if the operation pertains to the widgets in a window, the windows of an application, or the applications on the system. > MSDN itself > takes some getting used to and the first few days I was simply drowning in > information overload. But at the end of the day, all the information is in > there and if you just took a walk through all of the garden, you might > remember where you saw a particular flower before. It doesn't matter if all of the information is in there: if you can't find it using reasonable search methods, it isn't good enough. On the other hand, MSDN 6 is certainly a bit better than MSDN 5. I never could figure out enough from 5 to want to learn Windows, with 6, it started to seem possible, but there are still plenty of roadblocks. > On second thought, I'd like to speak of cacti rather than flowers ;-) Yes, stop and smell the cholla :) -- Glenn ===== Due to the current economic situation, the light at the end of the tunnel will be turned off until further notice.
