API hooks discrepency - character-encoding

I have been trying to understand the concept of 'hooking' APIs and am currently facing a problem. I hope that experts here can clear it:
By going through a header file I noticed that the LoadLibrary function is actually mapped to one of the following two: LoadLibraryW or LoadLibraryA based on the flag used during compilation (UNICODE or ASCII, respectively). Now, if I have explicitly hooked the API 'LoadLibraryA' then will my hooked function get the control if it is compiled using the UNICODE flag?
It would be great if someone could explain or point me to a link that explains in detail how hooking works in such cases? How do compilation flags, character sets, locale, internationalization, impact hooking of APIs like LoadLibrary or CreateFile?
I'm currently in South Korea (Originally from UK) and for some reason some of my application is not working and I have a demo tomorrow. I presume the above mentioned doubt is the reason for the problem I'm facing.

I think that you need to read carefully this bible of api hooking Hooking in theory which explains everything about hooking like different approaches of hooking, lot of diagrams.... and also this one example. My suggestion is to use LoadLibraryW because it is superset of Acsii.
Bye

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F# Priority Queue

I have tried to use this snippet of code
https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsdesktop/Net-Implementation-of-a-d3ac7b9d
to implement a heap-based implementation of Prim's algorithm to solve the Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) problem in a non-directed connected graph.
after a few iterations, i find that the heap/priority queue is not well maintained anymore.
that is the head of the PriorityQueue doesn't have the lowest Key in the Heap.
PQ 0 [-7230, 309]
...
PQ 146 [-7277, 308]
Has anyone use this code and experienced similar problems ?
I can post a link on GitHub if anyone would be looking at it
My needs are for a heap datastructure which supports deletion of an element in the middle. It looks like Fsharpx.collections doesnt have such a data structure.
does anybody know a good implementation available somewhere ?
thanks
Recently, I ported a MaxHeap from PLINQ to F# here and made it MinHeap. It is array-based and performs much better than any "pure functional" alternative.
However, after a lot of benchmarking, I found that SortedDeque based on just a simple sorted circular buffer performs significantly better on most use cases even when I need to add or delete in the middle.
My answer is inspired by V.B. but here it is in full
I have used another library than FSharpx.collections, it is called
Spreads
read that page for details and instructions.
SortedDeque is the data structure i need for this problem.
I used the same code, just changing from the microsoft blog page code to the library functions and found the good result, so it is indeed some bug in the microsoft blog page code
PS. this spreads library has been designed to format financial data for quantitative analysis and i'm happy i found it !!! IT looks like this library is rather recent and thats why its not on top of Google's search or referenced in any other SO question (or if it is i didn't see it)
FSharpx.Collections is of no use for that problem as you can see from that discussion heap issue in FSharpx.Collections

Tools for searching full text in iOS bundle

Sorry for the generalized question...I have been hunting for a long time and haven't found anything I can use or easily adapt yet. I'd really appreciate any pointers!
I'm building a reference app that will contain several textbooks in plain-text format. I want the user to be able to perform a search, and get a table back with a list of results. I have a working prototype, but the search logic that I wrote isn't all that smart and it's been hell trying to make it better.
This is obviously a fairly common problem so I'm looking for a tool that I could adapt to the task. So far I've found Lucene (http://vafer.org/blog/20090107014544/) and Locayta (http://www.locayta.com/iOS-search-engine/locayta-search-mobile/)
Lucene appears to have been last updated for iOS 2...I don't even know if I'll be able to rework it myself. Maybe.
Locayta would probably work great, but a commercial license is $1,000 and I may not soon recoup that with this app, as it's a niche market.
Thanks!
We stumbled upon the same predicament where I work, and have yet to decide on a solution.
Locayta seems promising, but barring that, I've looked into SQLite's FTS3/FTS4 as well.
The only issue seemed the lack of a way to match partial words. It's easy to search for fields that contain whole words (eg. "paper" matches "printer paper", "paper punch", and "sketch paper"), or words that start with something (eg. "bi*" matches "binder", and "bicycle"), but there's no built in way to match a suffix.
If you don't require that functionality, FTS3/FTS4 might work.
I see you mentioned in the follow-up that your SQLite didn't recognize FTS3(), and I had the same issue at first.
Apparently it's not bundled into the iOS version by default, instead you have to download the SQLite3 amalgamation, and include it in the project manually. As found at is FTS available in the iOS build of SQLite?
Also note, the SQLITE_ENABLE_FTS3 variable is not enabled by default, you just have to add it to the configuration as detailed at http://www.sqlite.org/fts3.html#section_2
Hope this helps.
If you can translate plain C code to iOS Objective-C, then Apache Lucy (a loose "C" port of Lucene) might be worth a look.

how useful is Cling C++ JIT interpreter developed at CERN?

I recently watched great google talks speech about Cling - C++ language interpreter. But I wonder if anyone except people at CERN (where it is developed) are using Cling, and how good it is from non-collider-physics-scientist point of view, can you write desktop apps with it?
There are some videos of uses cases different from the High Energy Physics: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cling+c%2B%2B (I think first couple are the relevant ones)
It has the potential to be very useful, but it is very young. There is no documentation that I could find, no dedicated mailing list, no online tutorials. I was able to get small toy code to run, but couldn't figure out how to use it productively on a large library yet.
Cling project is well established one. You can find more information in their official website cling. They also have a forum
Thanks

dwscript - can anyone help with editor-debugger examples please?

I'm looking at the excellent dwscript for Delphi see here which provides a useful set of classes to implement a built in pascal script for your Application. I would very much appreciate some help with an example of how to link together the supplied debugging interface with an editor so that I can create breakpoints (and ideally see watches). Has anyone gone along this route please?
Thanks,
Brian
Most of the debugger doc is currently in this post
http://delphitools.info/2010/12/03/spotlight-on-dwss-idebugger/
Also the debugger interface hasn't changed much (if at all) since the original DWScript II (on SourceForge), so the old demos there should hopefully still work with minimal adjustments.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dws/
For breakpoints, you basically just check the source position of the Expr you get in DoDebug/OnDebug against the list of breakpoints. One simple and efficient way is to merely use TBits -using it as a boolean array of which lines have a breakpoint).
Evaluating/watching requires looking up a symbol, which will give you it's stack address, you can then lookup the value in the stack.
I'll try to add/update a debugging tasks demo for v2.2 (unless someone else does it before me ;) )
edit: as of 11-02-14 there is a TdwsDebugger component to facilitate debugging tasks.

Setting up help for a Delphi app

What's the best way to set up help (specifically HTML Help) for a Delphi application? I can see several options, all of which has disadvantages. Specifically:
I could set HelpContext in the forms designer wherever appropriate, but then I'm stuck having to track numbers instead of symbolic constants.
I could set HelpContext programmatically. Then I can use symbolic constants, but I'd have more code to keep up with, and I couldn't easily check the text DFMs to see which forms still need help.
I could set HelpKeyword, but since that does a keyword lookup (like Application.HelpKeyword) rather than a topic jump (like Application.HelpJump), I'd have to make sure that each of my help pages has a unique, non-changing, top-level keyword; this seems like extra work. (And there are HelpKeyword-related VCL bugs like this and this.)
I could set HelpKeyword, set an Application.OnHelp handler to convert HelpKeyword requests to HelpJump requests so that I can assign help by topic ID instead of keyword lookup, and add code such as my own help viewer (based on HelpScribble's code) that fixes the VCL bugs and lets HelpJump work with anchors. By this point, though, I feel like I'm working against the VCL rather than with it.
Which approach did you choose for your app?
When I first started researching how to do this several years ago, I first got the "All About help files in Borland Delphi" tutorial from: http://www.ec-software.com/support_tutorials.html
In that document, the section "Preparing a help file for context sensitive help" (which in my version of the document starts on page 28). It describes a nice numbering scheme you can use to organize your numbers into sections, e.g. Starting with 100000 for your main form and continuing with 101000 or 110000 for each secondary form, etc.
But then I wanted to use descriptive string IDs instead of numbers for my Help topics. I started using THelpRouter, which is part of EC Software's free Help Suite at: http://www.ec-software.com/downloads_delphi.html
But then I settled on a Help tool that supported string ID's directly for topics (I use Dr. Explain: http://www.drexplain.com/) so now I simply use HelpJump, e.g.:
Application.HelpJump('UGQuickStart');
I hope that helps.
We use symbolic constants. Yes, it is a bit more work, but it pays off. Especially because some of our dialogs are dynamically built and sometimes require different help IDs.
I create the help file, which gets the help topic ID, and then go around the forms and set their HelpContext values to them. Since the level of maintenance needed is very low - the form is unlikely to change help file context unless something major happens - this works just fine.
We use Help&Manual - its a wonderful tool, outputting almost any format of stuff you could want, doc, rtf, html, pdf - all from the same source. It will even read in (or paste from rtf (eg MSWord). It uses topic ID's (strings) which I just keep a list of and I manually put each one into a form (or class) as it suits me. Sounds difficult but trust me you'll spend far longer hating the wrong authouring tool. I spent years finding it!
Brian

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