Belated Introduction

Who: I'm Laurion Burchall, a Software Engineer on the Ese/Esent team.

What: A blog about the Esent API.

Why: Esent is an incredibly powerful embedded database engine that is part of Windows. It used by the Active Directory, Windows Desktop Search, Windows Update and several other windows clients. Microsoft Exchange uses a version of the same code, appearing as ese.dll. The Esent API is completely documented in MSDN and is available in all versions of Windows from Windows 2000 onwards (i.e. XP, W2K3, Vista, W2K8). The MSDN documentation covers the different API calls but doesn't always show how to put them together. In this blog I want to cover cases where API usage is tricky and give tips for better ESENT usage.