Pointer to a pointer to a pointer

I never thought I'd ever use the datatype void**** in a real project. Yet I did. That's the datatype of a pointer to a smart pointer to a COM object, which contains a pointer to the virtual function table, which is an array of function pointers.

Lack of a typelib is not a security fault

Amazing discovery of the day: Microsoft Word pops up a security prompt for a perfectly good macro if a reference to a typelib can't be resolved.

Abusing operator overloading for expression building

Sharepoint lists have a built-in SOAP API. In order to query a list, one has to build a query in XML, along the following lines:

<And><Eq><FieldRef Name="ID"/><Value>100</Value></Eq><NotNull><FieldRef Name="Name"/></NotNull></And>

Those strings are hard to follow, and building them is error prone. To the rescue comes operator overloading in C#. The idea is: field names are wrapped in class instances, comparison between those and numbers/strings produces a condition object, AND/OR between those produces compound condition objects, on the final stage you serialize that chain into an XML string.

The only caveat is, C# doesn't allow for && and || overloading, so we have to overload the bitwize operators & and | instead. The precedence is still what one would expect - AND before OR.


With that in place, the expression above can be written like that:

CAMLField f_ID = F("ID"), f_Name = F("Name");
(f_ID == 100 & f_Name.NotNull).ToString();

Windows Phone vs. CE legacy

The Core Connectivity API totally works for Windows Phone 8.

They've changed CLSIDs of all classes and IIDs of all interfaces, but the new ones can be fairly easily seen in the registry. There are several new interfaces (ICcConnection2/3/4, notably) that make more sense for the Windows Phone security model. There's no arbitrary file/registry access that I can see (those methods return E_ACCESSDENIED), but some methods still work.

This new CoreCon has version numbers 10/11/12, which probably corresponds to Visual Studio 10/12/13 that it comes with. The DLLs are under C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\microsoft shared\Phone Tools\CoreCon\12.0\Bin. Most amazingly, the main DLL - ConMan2.dll - has debug symbols on Microsoft Symbol Server. Poking around it in a debugger or in a disassembler is a pleasure, considering.

Let's see how far this takes me. The LaunchApplication() method works, but I wonder what rights in the filesystem do I have...