win32utils devel - Dec 2006 - FormatMessage issue in eventlog.rb - more clues

Hi all,

Ok, I''m getting closer on this get_description failure and the 
mscoree.dll file.  It has something to do with the way we''re calling 
FormatMessage().  Consider the following C code, which behaves exactly 
the same way as the current Ruby code:

#include <windows.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main(){
    HMODULE hmod;
    int rv;
    char buf[4096];
    char* dll = "C:\\WINDOWS\\system32\\mscoree.dll";
    char* va_list[3];
    int flags = FORMAT_MESSAGE_FROM_HMODULE |
                FORMAT_MESSAGE_FROM_SYSTEM |
                FORMAT_MESSAGE_ARGUMENT_ARRAY;

    hmod = LoadLibraryEx(dll, 0, LOAD_LIBRARY_AS_DATAFILE);
    printf("HMOD: %i\n", hmod);

    va_list[0] = "store application started";

    rv = FormatMessage(
       flags,
       hmod,
       0,
       0,
       (LPTSTR)buf,
       sizeof(buf),
       va_list
    );

    printf("RV: %i\n", rv);
    printf("BUF: %s\n", buf);

    FreeLibrary(hmod);

    return 0;
}

This will print "The operation completed successfully".  Which, btw,
is
what GetLastError(39) returns.  How that ends up getting assigned to the 
buffer, I''m not sure.

Now, consider this approach:

int main(){
    HMODULE hmod;
    int rv;
    char* message;
    char* dll = "C:\\WINDOWS\\system32\\mscoree.dll";
    int flags = FORMAT_MESSAGE_ALLOCATE_BUFFER |
                FORMAT_MESSAGE_FROM_HMODULE    |
                FORMAT_MESSAGE_IGNORE_INSERTS;

    hmod = LoadLibraryEx(dll, 0, LOAD_LIBRARY_AS_DATAFILE);
    printf("HMOD: %i\n", hmod);

    rv = FormatMessage(
       flags,
       hmod,
       0,
       0,
       (LPSTR)&message,
       0,
       NULL
    );

    printf("RV: %i\n", rv);

    FreeLibrary(hmod);
    return 0;
}

This fails as expected.

More clues, but I''m still not sure what the appropriate solution is
yet.

Regards,

Dan