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Which Microsoft Windows API do you hate the most?Submitted by veridicus on March 27, 2008 - 10:13am.
i never understood that about mapiI never understood that about mapi.... Why the fuck does it need to have the application running to make the API available? I can't imagine what the technical reason could be; I have to assume it was laziness. Knowing Windows it probably lets you call functions that are defined in other processes....i mean, what harm could there be in that?? My favorite thing about MAPI was how badly it munged emails coming in. When I was writing software for the Blackberry, I had to interface with this "server" that communicated with the handhelds using emails. Of course, it was a whitespace sensitive format, and MAPI was following the Outlook rules for making line breaks, so when it would wrap a line, it would actually replace the space after the word with a carriage return. But when a line was just too long, and had no spaces, it would be wrapped anyways (by just inserting another carriage return), so there was no way to "unwrap" the lines.... Man, it was great.... MDAC for the loseI had no problems learning any of the other APIs. I still think the original COM is a brilliantly simple interface layer. It may have been extended for evil (DCOM) but COM itself is awesome. BTW, of all of the various names and flavors of COM (COM, OLE, COM+, DCOM, ActiveX, OLE2), ADO is an implementation of a data accessor object, and is not a "type" of COM. |
Win32
I had to vote Win32 because it's such a convoluted mess. It's so difficult to work with they had to build .NET on top of it to get a new generation of young developers interested.
MAPI was pleasant to work with. Of course it's very small. But what sucked was how Windows and Outlook handled the requests if the mail application was closed. You would think it would simply launch the registered mail client and process in the background, but of course not.