Why does the function WSASetLastError exist?

re: Why does the function WSASetLastError exist?

Aaron — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 22:18:17 GMT

Thats how my company succeeds in business too. Just keep getting other people to lower the bar until something bad is tolerable :P

re: Why does the function WSASetLastError exist?

mike — Sat, 10 Sep 2005 16:59:00 GMT

Of all the ugly things in Windows this is one of the most tolerable.

re: Why does the function WSASetLastError exist?

Larry Osterman [MSFT] — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 16:23:11 GMT

Goran, why do you think he looked at the history for this? It's HIGHLY unlikely this stuff is in the source code history.

Instead, he probably just figured it out because he understands the context in which the APIs were developed (knowing Raymond, he most likely also went to the guys who wrote winsock (two of them are still at MS) and confirmed it).

Leave your SourceSafe alone!

Goran — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 12:05:34 GMT

:-))

I think somebody from Redmond sys administration is going to kill Raymond's VSS account! I mean, how long will they put up with him wandering through VSS history to look for trivia of this kind?

re: Why does the function WSASetLastError exist?

Yaytay — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 00:48:51 GMT

456,
You are right, thank you, now I can ignore it with impunity.
Nothing about it in MSDN though.

So which is definitive, MSDN or the Winsock 2 spec?
I would have thought that the comment in the Winsock spec is just a comment about a current implementation and that to be officially an alias for GetLastError it would need to say it in MSDN.

Go on, prove me wrong, show me the dark and dingy corner of MSDN that says it.
Please.

re: Why does the function WSASetLastError exist?

Michael Dunn_ — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 00:33:47 GMT

How did Win16 communicate errors, if there was no SetLastError (and, I assume, no GetLastError either)?

re: Why does the function WSASetLastError exist?

Aaron — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 00:08:26 GMT

Actually it looks kind of stupid even if you are aware of that.

re: Why does the function WSASetLastError exist?

456 — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 23:45:10 GMT

Its documented in the WinSock 2 specification:

"This function is implemented in WinSock 2 as an alias for the Win32 function GetLastError(), ..."

http://paginas.fe.up.pt/~jmcruz/etc/sockets/winsock22.pdf

re: Why does the function WSASetLastError exist?

Yaytay — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 22:45:39 GMT

Sven's comments sums up what's annoying about WSAGetLastError - the fact that it isn't documented to return the same as GetLastError.
In all my experiments it does, and I suspect it just returns GetLastError() on Win32, but it ought to be documented.

More importantly, why are there a whole bunch of winhttp errors that don't work with FormatMessage?

re: Why does the function WSASetLastError exist?

Sven — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 21:50:16 GMT

And GetLastError returns the same error code as WSAGetLastError?