I've been using Microsoft's CryptoAPI for several months now with the MSDN website as my only resource.
Unfortunately, this resource uses C to document the APIs and all the sample code is in C as well. So I was delighted to see Chapman's book with a title targeted to Visual Basic developers.
Indeed Chapman includes VB snippets to document the CAPI and includes whole VB projects as demonstration applications. You can download all the projects from the (public) website:
This is all good and an improvement for VB developers who have struggled to learn the CAPI from documentation written in C. Chapman includes VB declarations for the CAPI functions, translates constants from WinCrypt.h from C into VB, and creates VB user-defined types that correspond to the C structures. These things are very, very helpful. They will save developers a great deal of time and the source of many typographical errors that require debugging effort.
I was disappointed, however, that Chapman didn't go further. A VB developer who understands the CAPI could use what he's supplied very effectively. But that is the catch 22. The CAPI is cumbersome and desperately needs some sort of object model and COM wrapper to make it usable to newcomers. Chapman stops at function declarations and requires the VB developer to make all the right calls in the right order with the right arguments. This is really doing C development in VB.
To summarize this is a good book and worth purchasing but there is still the opportunity to do it one better. Hopefully someone will.
