On 08/26/2011 12:52 AM, Francois Gouget wrote:
On Thu, 25 Aug 2011, Vincent Povirk wrote: [...]
- Is a Windows application likely to need this?
I'd add a couple of factors that pertain to this:
Is the behavior documented by the MSDN? If yes then applications are more likely to rely on it.
Does the behavior correspond to a known usage pattern? If yes, then even if not documented in the MSDN, applications are likely to depend on it. Two examples:
- APIs that take an 'LPSTR output_buffer, DWORD *buffer_size' pair of parameters. If they allow the programmer to pass 'NULL, &size' where size=0 as parameters to determine the required buffer size, then you can expect applications to make use of it even if the MSDN forgot to document it.
- APIs that take output parameters and will simply not fill them if the pointer is NULL instead of crashing.
Incidentally, this is basically what the series of tests I wrote that prompted this discussion check. They're currently at "pending" in patch tracker.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb759980
Of course the first thing to test is that these are are actually supported across a broad swath of the more recent Windows versions.
Do you think testbot handles that nicely?
Thanks, Scott Ritchie