DllStructCreate vs. GlobalAlloc

[jwilliams]

Hello,

I'm relatively new to dll access and Windows system programming, so please forgive me if this is a simple question.

I'm dealing with a dll that I need to call directly. The documentation indicates that the dll needs a memory space allocated to it (up to 32kB). And in the documentation, it gives a Visual Basic example using GlobalAlloc (function in kernel32.dll).

My questions are...

1) what's the difference between allocating memory for a dll using GlobalAlloc and DllStructCreate?

2) GlobalAlloc seems to simply allocate memory, whereas DllStructCreate assigns the memory a datatype or datatypes. Is this a critical difference?

Thanks for any insight.