Earlier this week Microsoft posted details of a large number of APIs (272, we are told - we have not counted) in the MSDN library. This publication is intended to to comply with the terms of the MS-DoJ proposed settlement to the antitrust suit, and is part of a process whereby Microsoft 'levels the playing filed' for rival software publishers and developers by disclosing APIs and protocols, and offering them for license.
But the API disclosure seems at best utterly irrelevant, and at worst counter-productive, because it is not complete, and some of the information is misleading or wrong. Henk Devos, author of Registry Explorer (an alternative to regedit), has reviewed the documentation since it went up on Monday US time, and says it contains errors, and there are still some things that have been left out. He gives the examples of IBrowserFrameOptions and IDelegateFolder as missing (he says he's figured out the second anyway, but not the first), and that "now that SHCreateShellFolderViewEx has finally been documented after 7 years, the docs are wrong. The structure that they describe for the parameter is wrong."
|