SWFOX - "The amazing VFP2C32 library" - session by Eric Selje

eric selje summarizes very well what is vfp2c32 in his white paper:

vfp2c32 is an fll that encapsulates windows api functionality into functions that are easily called from vfp.
the advantages to this fll are

• you don’t have to explicitly declare each dll you want to use
  
• the fll takes care of converting the parameters into a struct that the api understands, which relieves you of a huge burden
  
• it gracefully handles errors that the api returns
  
• all c++ source code is included

christian ehlscheidt from germany did a fabulous job in this library. the quantity of functions wrapped from the confusing win32 api is very big, and i've been using this library since 2006 for some specific tasks, but i confess that i always felt that i was not using even 1% of all it could provide to me. apart from that, indirectly i've been using it as a part of the ctl32 library from carlos alloatti.

unfortunately the documentation was very poor. the download came with some nice samples, but that was all. so, for me, eric's session in swfox represented a great oportunity to get in touch with some more features, functions from this library. i had already read the whitepaper on the plane, and it was a very nice teaser for me :-)

i was really glad to see that this has changed. christian documented a great part of the functions, and eric selje provided an additional documentation, with detailed samples as the white paper for his great session. it was very nice to see it being shown to people, because this library is considered a real gem.

another cool thing shown by eric that i didn't know is that christian delivers a prg that installs intellisense for these functions, a terrific help. cool to know that some functions from the libcurl wrapper from carlos alloatti are there only because of some callback functions from vfp2c32.

after this session, i got really encouraged to get back to this library, and enhance my benefits from it. if you already use the ctl32 classes, you don't even have to install it, because it's already there !