The other day I asked someone for a open file dialog box solution and they came up with it pretty quickly. The fact that others could find information so fast raised a question. Are people memorizing whole libraries? (Win32, DirectX, .NET) Is it because they have learned by experience? Are some just good at parsing the MSDN? Aside from asking other people, how do you all go about finding code solutions?

Quote:Are people memorizing whole libraries? (Win32, DirectX, .NET)

Some do.

Quote:Is it because they have learned by experience?

Some have

Quote:Are some just good at parsing the MSDN?

Some are.

Quote:Aside from asking other people, how do you all go about finding code solutions?

Google and other search engines, as well as various wikis, books, reference manuals, any reference repositories actually.

Keep in mind that opening an open file dialog is a pretty common task and it's also a fairly common question on the forums, so a quick answer doesn't necessarily indicate memorizing MSDN. If you use a library enough you will eventually memorize common functions to use or at least be able to think something like "I think the function name I need is either BarFoo() or FooBar(). Let's look up both and see if either is what I wanted."

For MSDN, it's often good enough to be able to think of a name of a related function even if you don't know the exact name of the function you want. For example, if you want to find a function to find a file's size, you don't necessarily need to know that it's GetFileSize(). Instead, you can look up CreateFile() in the index section MSDN, and hit the sync button to show the contents section for file management functions and then scan the list of functions for something that sounds right.