From: Billy Brown (bbrown@transcient.com)
Date: Mon May 01 2000 - 14:37:26 MDT
Martin Ling wrote:
> ActiveX components are simply Windows executables. Making a runtime for
> them would basically mean making a runtime to allow Windows programs to
> run on other OS's. This is *not* a simple task, and not one Microsoft is
> willing to allow (they refuse to document the APIs, hence everything has
> to be reverse-engineered).
What alternate universe are we talking about here? I know it can't be the
real world, because I currently have on my hard drive a complete set of
Microsoft documentation for pretty much the entire Windows API set. They
don't quite give this away, but they come pretty close - it's only a couple
hundred dollars a year for a complete subscription.
Obviously they don't completely document every possible bug, side effect or
unsupported call in existence, but that isn't because there is some
conspiracy to keep it secret. Rather, it is because they only have so much
money to spend on developer outreach. The information they do make available
is far more complete that the docs I used to work with for Unix and Mac
APIs, and about as good as I would ever expect to see for a product that
changes substantially every few years.
Billy Brown
bbrown@transcient.com
http://www.transcient.com
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