Duncan Pearson’s DDE and DLL Workshop

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 48

This very successful workshop was composed of a set of printed exercises, notes and detailed descriptions of several supplied utility functions within the Windows Kernel DLL. It was taught in a room equipped with many 486 PCs completely set up with Excel, Word, Dyalog/W and APL*PLUS/III under Windows.

Although all the main points of Dynamic Data Exchange and Dynamic Link Libraries have been reported within Vector, there can be few readers who have had hands-on experience of them under both major vendors’ APLs on the same machine.

Duncan’s notes were both clear and concise, and highlighted the differences in use between the Dyadic and Manugistics offerings.

By supplying the correctly set up environment (hardware and software), the notes on what to do and the information sheets specifying the syntax details and other data, Duncan created the ideal environment for exploring DDE and DDL. We were not spoon-fed with complete scripts, but were given all the required information, and had to understand the implication of what we were doing to proceed.

The main advantage of a workshop such as this as against trying it at home (relying on, say, an article in Vector) is that we were not distracted by unrelated problems (such as incorrectly set up or incompatible software/hardware). Whenever I have tried playing at home with new features of this sort, I have always found I had a set-up different from the one used by the author of the guiding article, and have been constantly sidetracked finding out why things didn’t work as the article said they should.

All in all I found this workshop one of the highlights of the conference. It alone fully justified my attendance.

Thank you Duncan.