well this makes me feel alot better, knowing that no one else remembers these things either

-arsenius
''after three days without programming, life becomes meaningless'' -The Tao of Programming

I can make fully SDI, MDI Win32 application with VC++ without any helps from wizards etc, i can add controls etc straight from memory also alot of GDI stuff i can handle with no prob. Sometimes i do need some time to bring it out from memory but thats rare. With DirectDraw 7 i can do similar things, DirectX 8 is now in learning and i can do basic DirectX8 straight from memory. I didnt learn that on purpose, i just started new projects all from the ground and it just stuck with me. Its all in practise, more you do more you will know. Also i read a lot of MSDN technical articles that describes things little more on lower level that on just some hyper-abstract thing. This helps me a lot, well...thats basiclly it.

Intellisense helps me a lot (only when it DOES work....)

I used to be a fairly heavy cut-n-paste programmer. But as the programs got larger, this become slow and annoying. So I actively started trying to learn the API sets. Try to remember/guess/name things well, so that I could just write what I needed.

I recently had to do some code in Notepad and discovered that I have been learning. A LOT. It made me focus on my coding and really think about what I was doing. It compiled the first time I built it and ran perfectly.

I do like the intellisense when learning new, large objects. But I try to avoid it, otherwise. It makes me consciously know the right name for variables, functions, and paramaters.

Memorizing existing stuff is good, naming your stuff consistantly well is better.