VBPOINT.LL
by Jonathan Zuck
Copyright 1991 User Friendly, Inc.
"You are hereby granted liscence to use and distribute this DLL along with
your software. If you distribute the DLL and API to other programers, you
must distribute it with *at least* all of the files in this ZIP file:

VBPOINT.DLL The DLL for pointer support
VBPOINT.MAK The VB MAK file for the demo
VBPOINT.FRM The VB form for the demo
VBPOINT.TXT This DOC file

As long as this condition is met, you owe no restitution to UFI."

What is VBPOINT.DLL?
This is a dynamic link library, written in Turbo Pascal for Windows that
adds some much needed pointer support to Visual Basic. There are two
exported routines in VBPoint: LP2Str$ and Str2LP.

LP2Str$ is a string function that copies data, pointed to by a so-called
"Long Pointer" into a Visual Basic proprietary string variable. In many
instances the long pointer will be the pointer to a null-terminated string
and many DLLs return this sort of string in their exported functions.
However, you are by no means limited to string data. This might be a pointer
to global memory, an integer or an record variable array. Here lies the
solution to the missing keywords: MK? and BSAVE.

Str2LP is a subroutine that will copy data from one address to another. With
this function you can create the CV? and BLOAD commands.

When am I passing a long pointer?
In VB you are passing a long pointer to a DLL routine when pass a string
variable, using the ByVal keyword and when you pass any other variable
type without it. This includes passing a record variable or the first
element of a numeric array.

In a Windows DLL API, you are using a long pointer anytime the variable
type that is specified begins with the letters 'LP' such as LPSTR, LPVOID
etc. A number of DLLs return long pointers in their functions. Two that
come to mind in the Windows API are GetDosEnvironment which returns the
address of the environment table and GlobalLock which locks an area of
global memory.

The environment table is an example of one type of string array used in C.
It is one contiguous blob of memory with each variable separated by a NULL.
This sort of array is popular in network APIs. So, even though you have
the ENVIRON$ function in VB, it is instructive to see how to walk through
one of these sorts of arrays. One of the most powerful things about these
functions is that you can simply add to the LONG variable and you will
be pointing further into memory. This is the technique used in the example.

Through a combination of GlobalAlloc and GlobalLock, you could easily
mimic the functionality of HUGEARR.DLL. All that DLL does is GlobalAlloc
a big chunk of memory and returns the handle to you. When you want to
access an element in the array, the DLL does a GlobalLock on the memory
handle which returns a...that's right class, a long pointer. The DLL
then calculates the offset into that memory where your data should go
and you are in business. For simplicity, let's take the example of a huge
integer array where each element is two bytes: We want 50,000 elements so
we GlobalAlloc 100,000 bytes. Now we want to insert a value at element
number 10,000 (or byte 20,000). We GlobalLock the memory handle we got
back with our call to GlobalAlloc and that returns us a long pointer to our
memory chunk. We then add 20,000 to that pointer and:

Str2LP (MyInt, ByVal NewPointer&, 2)

Hopefully you start to see the power of this little function!

I hope this was helpful and not too confusing! Eeep! I will try to do an
even better job of explaining all this in Visual Basic Techniques and
Utilities coming out first quarter next year. Hope you grab a copy!

Jonathan Zuck
October 4, 1991
Washington, DC