IanG on Tap

Anyone who has done much Win32 development will be familiar with this scenario:

You need to use some Win32 API. You know what it's called, but for some reason you can't remember exactly what should be passed for all 47 parameters, so you go and look it up in MSDN library. The documentation page comes up, and appears to tell you what you need to know. And yet you feel tense. Some highly specialised developer's intuition tells you that all is not well in the land of the help window.

And then it hits you. Yes, once again, you're not looking at Win32 documentation - you're looking at something you cannot conceive of ever wanting to examine: the WinCE documentation.

Of course, the longer you do Windows development, the better you get at spotting the differences in fonts and formatting of the WinCE docs. Indeed, the most highly-trained Win32 experts will suffer an intense stabbing headache within 34ms of seeing a WinCE documentation page. They also tend to need to go into therapy for about six months any time Microsoft changes the formatting of the main Win32 documentation.

Obviously a better solution would be to delete all WinCE documentation from the MSDN in perpetuity, and burn any physical artefacts that could possibly lead to it being reintroduced. But until that happy day we all dream of arrives, be thankful that a compromise exists: it's possible to configure your help viewer to ignore the WinCE content.

Saurabh shows how. He believes this will be his claim to fame. I suspect he may be right. It's certainly been enough to inspire me to subscribe to his blog.