Many OpenInsight functions and subroutines, such as Utility(), DSpace, and Dir(), call functions in the Microsoft Windows API. For most applications, these are sufficient. However, there may be occasions when you might need to call the Windows API directly. The steps for doing this are documented in Chapter 7: Calling DLL Functions from BASIC+.
The Windows API is vast, containing thousands of functions, allowing you to get "under the hood" of Windows. It would be impossible to incorporate all permutations of function calls in OpenInsight, or to provide an example of every type of Windows API function.
This chapter contains code examples of useful, real-world techniques for using the Windows API functions to give you some ideas for enhancing your OpenInsight applications. Another goal is to present a standard, easily maintained method of calling the Windows API functions. The examples were also chosen to illustrate coding techniques such as passing by value instead of by reference, passing structures, and passing different data types.
The chapter shows how to:
