What is this and does it work

[pizzaboy150]

Hi chaps been playing with the XPLANE API and windows API and what is this?

PLUGIN_API??? its not static, public what is it and how does it work can anyone point me to any begginer tutorials regarding this?

I seem it a low when trying to program windows and don't understand it?

PLUGIN_API int XPluginStart(
						char *		outName,
						char *		outSig,
						char *		outDesc)
{

[JayzisLazy]

you need to be little more specific.

[pizzaboy150]

Sorry to be vague the code ->PLUGIN_API<- what is that doing is it defining a type?

I see it often in the windows API but do not understand how it works or what it is doing?

int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance,
    LPSTR lpCmdLine, int nCmdShow)

Here we are defining the method WinMain with a return type of int but what does WINAPI do?

[NyhkoG1T]

It is a defined macro. You could effectively replace PLUGIN_API with

extern "C" __declspec(dllexport)

and it would still function properly.

PLUGIN_API, however, is easier on the eyes

[MikeyBoy]

There's a convention in C and C++ programming that, when you see a name that's all in upper-case characters, it's usually a macro or a #defined symbol. So if you see something like PLUGIN_API, you can guess that it's a macro, and use your IDE to find the definition of it.

Edit: I often see const values also given all-upper-case names in C++, as well. This makes sense, as they're often doing the job that a #defined symbol would have done in C.

[pizzaboy150]

Thanks guys that has pointed me in the right direction I now know what I need to learn.

Thank you!