Steven Engelhardt

So it looks like the Crosstown Expressway may be rising, zombie-like, from the dead.

I live within about 1.5 miles from the western edge of the proposed expressway, so I have a personal interest in this proposal. However, as I have no particularly deep or insightful thoughts about it, I’ll summarize my views with “I support it, with reservations.”

Update 2007-02-22 10:14AM: Today I read this quote:

[Chicago Mayor Richard M.] Daley favors a two-lane, truck-only “freeway” — with a mass transit line down the middle — built on a platform to avoid displacing hundreds of homes and businesses in the Cicero Avenue corridor.

If that’s the final proposal, I rescind my earlier support. The freeway should be accessible by cars.

The Win32 shell lightweight utility API (shlwapi.dll) is a cornucopia of useful functions. It appears to be Microsoft’s “dumping ground” for functions without a better home. (I believe Microsoft internal DLL ownership also played a part.) Had I known about shlwapi years ago, it would have saved me considerable programming effort.

Particularly useful are SHCreateStreamOnFile, the path family of functions (e.g. PathCombine), and the registry family of functions (e.g. SHRegGetPath).

However, it appears that Microsoft is slowly moving functionality out of shlwapi into other places. For example, many of shlwapi’s string handling functions have better-designed replacements in Microsoft’s safe string library strsafe. Similarly, shlwapi’s SHRegGetValue has been deprecated in favor of advapi32.dll’s RegGetValue.

Be sure to look at all the functionality shlwapi provides — you may find a hidden gem of your own!