Here’s a question: Why is the Pocket PC 2002 SDK documentation so bad? Time and time again the documentation is incorrect, parameters are wrong, things are missing or even worse, not even in the platform.

This is the current situation: A few days ago, I promised Bryce that I would wrap the Pocket PC Spell Checker API’s with a COM interface so he could call it from Embedded Visual Basic. I’ve spent the last 2 days on this problem so I can finally sum it up in a nutshell: The documentation is WRONG.

According to the docs, the Pocket PC spell checker functions (ironically in a section entitled “Integrating Engines into an Application“) are prototyped in splapi.h, and can be found in splusa.dll on the device. Well, splapi.h is empty, nothing but a few comments, and to top it off, splusa.dll isn’t even on Pocket PC (it’s used on Platform Builder Windows CE builds). So, just for my own amusement, I fired up Pocket Word, started a spell check, then ran remote process viewer. Whoa! What’s this? cespell.dll is now in memory. Pocket Inbox apparently uses this rouge spelling API as well. No documentation for it. Nothing on google either. Now im going to have to see if I can figure out a way to access these undocumented functions (someone needs to write “Undocumented Windows CE”).

I’ve been writing commercial applications now for almost 10 years, so believe me, I totally understand how things can slip through, QA can miss something, the software has a “undocumented feature”, or it’s just plain broken, but this is a bit ridiculous. How can Microsoft expect developers to write quality applications for an emerging platform without a decent SDK?

Fortunately, im grateful that the .NET documentation isn’t this bad.