I’m working on some ideas to enhance Solvent and I’ve realized that one of the things I want to do will require some low-level shell programming.

I hate low level shit.

Looking at MSDN, it seems that the only real way to do it is to use C++ (because of the ridiculous amount of weird pointer stuff that’s happening).

I tried pInvoking my way to freedom and leisure. There’s only one problem with that: When there are marshaling issues, I’m not a COM person… I don’t know how to fix them. I live in a higher-level programming world: garbage collection and high-level data structures and no fussing with memory allocation issues. It’s been like seven years since I’ve dealt with anything C or C++ related.

Try as I might, though, I can’t get myself quite DllImported into the Windows Shell.

As such, this weekend I went out and bought Visual C++ .NET - Step By Step. I’m only on like the second chapter (no time!) but I’ve skimmed through the rest.

Lots has changed since I last worked with this stuff. ATL? Funky reserved words (__gc, __value, etc.)? Maybe that’s standard stuff that has always been around, but then, I learned C++ in Solaris on SPARC workstations, which means I read a little about MFC but never had opportunity to use any of it.

(By now, all of you VC++ people out there are shaking your heads. Gimme a break; I’m [re]learning!)

It’ll be good to come up to speed on it; if anything, an interesting exercise in crash-course style learning. Who knows… I might even read the whole thing instead of just enough to get my project done. Heh.