Windows API

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The Windows API, informally WinAPI, is Microsoft's core set of application programming
interfaces (APIs) available in the Microsoft Windows operating systems. It was formerly
called the Win32 API; however, the name Windows API more accurately reflects its roots in
16-bit Windows and its support on 64-bit Windows. Almost all Windows programs interact
with the Windows API; a small number (such as programs started early in the Windows
startup process) use the Native API.[1]

The Microsoft Windows SDK (Software Development Kit) is available for Windows, which
provides documentation and tools to enable developers to create software using the Windows
API and associated Windows technologies.

Contents
[hide]

 1 Overview
o 1.1 Web
o 1.2 Multimedia
o 1.3 Program interaction
o 1.4 Wrapper libraries
 2 History
 3 Versions
 4 Other implementations
 5 Compiler support
 6 See also
 7 Notes
 8 References
 9 External links

[edit] Overview
The functionality provided by the Windows API can be grouped into eight categories:[2]

Base Services[3]
Provide access to the fundamental resources available to a Windows system. Included
are things like file systems, devices, processes and threads, and error handling. These
functions reside in kernel.exe, krnl286.exe or krnl386.exe files on 16-bit
Windows, and kernel32.dll on 32-bit Windows.
Advanced Services
 Provide access to functionality that is an addition on the kernel. Included are things
like the Windows registry, shutdown/restart the system (or abort), start/stop/create a
Windows service, manage user accounts. These functions reside in advapi32.dll on
32-bit Windows.
Graphics Device Interface[4]
Provides functionality for outputting graphical content to monitors, printers and other
output devices. It resides in gdi.exe on 16-bit Windows, and gdi32.dll on 32-bit
Windows in user-mode. Kernel-mode GDI support is provided by win32k.sys which
communicates directly with the graphics driver.[5]
User Interface[6]
Provides the functionality to create and manage screen windows and most basic
controls, such as buttons and scrollbars, receive mouse and keyboard input, and other
functionality associated with the GUI part of Windows. This functional unit resides in
user.exe on 16-bit Windows, and user32.dll on 32-bit Windows. Since Windows
XP versions, the basic controls reside in comctl32.dll, together with the common
controls (Common Control Library).
Common Dialog Box Library[7]
Provides applications the standard dialog boxes for opening and saving files, choosing
color and font, etc. The library resides in a file called commdlg.dll on 16-bit
Windows, and comdlg32.dll on 32-bit Windows. It is grouped under the User
Interface category of the API.
Common Control Library[8]
Gives applications access to some advanced controls provided by the operating
system. These include things like status bars, progress bars, toolbars and tabs. The
library resides in a DLL file called commctrl.dll on 16-bit Windows, and
comctl32.dll on 32-bit Windows. It is grouped under the User Interface category of
the API.
Windows Shell[9][10]
Component of the Windows API allows applications to access the functionality
provided by the operating system shell, as well as change and enhance it. The
component resides in shell.dll on 16-bit Windows, and shell32.dll on 32-bit
Windows. The Shell Lightweight Utility Functions are in shlwapi.dll. It is grouped
under the User Interface category of the API.
Network Services[11]
Give access to the various networking capabilities of the operating system. Its sub-
components include NetBIOS, Winsock, NetDDE, RPC and many others.

[edit] Web

The Internet Explorer web browser also exposes many API's that are often used by
applications, and as such could be considered a part of the Windows API. Internet Explorer
has been included with the operating system since Windows 98 Second Edition, and has
provided web related services to applications since Windows 98.[12] Specifically, it is used to
provide:

 An embeddable web browser control, contained in shdocvw.dll and mshtml.dll.

 The URL monitor service, held in urlmon.dll, which provides COM objects to
applications for resolving URLs. Applications can also provide their own URL
handlers for others to use.
  A library for assisting with multi-language and international text support (mlang.dll).
 DirectX Transforms, a set of image filter components.
 XML support (the MSXML components, held in msxml*.dll).
 Access to the Windows Address Book.

[edit] Multimedia

Microsoft has provided the DirectX set of APIs as part of every Windows installation since
Windows 95 OSR2. DirectX provides a loosely related set of multimedia and gaming
services, including:

 Direct3D for access to 3D hardware accelerated graphics.

 DirectDraw for hardware accelerated access to the 2D framebuffer. As of DirectX 9,
this component has been deprecated in favor of Direct3D, which provides more
general high-performance graphics functionality (as 2D rendering is a subset of 3D
rendering).
 DirectSound for low level hardware accelerated sound card access.
 DirectInput for communication with input devices such as joysticks and gamepads.
 DirectPlay as a multiplayer gaming infrastructure. This component has been
deprecated as of DirectX 9 and Microsoft no longer recommends its use for game
development.
 DirectShow which builds and runs generic multimedia pipelines. It is comparable to
the GStreamer framework and is often used to render in-game videos and build media
players (Windows Media Player is based upon it). DirectShow is no longer
recommended for game development.
 DirectMusic - allows playing of MIDI files, deprecated.

[edit] Program interaction

The Windows API mostly concerns itself with the interaction between the operating system
and an application. For communication between the different Windows applications among
themselves, Microsoft has developed a series of technologies alongside the main Windows
API. This started out with Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE), which was superseded by Object
Linking and Embedding (OLE) and later by the Component Object Model (COM),
Automation Objects, ActiveX controls, and the .NET Framework. There is not always a clear
distinction between these technologies, and there is quite a lot of overlap.

The variety of terms is basically the result of grouping software mechanisms that relate to a
particular aspect of software development. Automation specifically relates to exporting the
functionality of an application or component (as an API) so that it can be controlled by
another application instead of just by a human user, .NET is a self-contained general
methodology and technology for developing Desktop and Web applications written in a
variety of interpreted programming languages, and so forth.

[edit] Wrapper libraries

Various wrappers were developed by Microsoft that took over some of the more low level
functions of the Windows API, and allowed applications to interact with the API in a more
abstract manner. Microsoft Foundation Class Library (MFC) wrapped Windows API
functionality in C++ classes, and thus allows a more object oriented way of interacting with
the API. The Active Template Library (ATL) is a template oriented wrapper for COM. The
Windows Template Library (WTL) was developed as an extension to ATL, and intended as a
lightweight alternative to MFC.

Also notable are some of Borland's offerings. Object Windows Library (OWL) was released
as a competing product to MFC, and offered a similar object-oriented wrapper. Borland later
deprecated it in favour of the Visual Component Library (VCL), which is written in Object
Pascal and available in both Delphi and C++ Builder.

Most application frameworks for Windows are (at least partially) wrapping the Windows
API. Thus, the .NET Framework and Java, as well as any other programming languages
under Windows, are (or contain) Wrapper Libraries.
Windows API Code Pack for Microsoft .NET Framework is a .Net Wrapper Library for
Windows API.

Note that in 64-bit versions of Windows, the same naming of the DLL files is used.

[edit] History
The Windows API has always exposed a large part of the underlying structure of the
Windows systems to the programmer. This has had the advantage of giving Windows
programmers a great deal of flexibility and power over their applications. However, it also
has given Windows applications a great deal of responsibility in handling various low-level,
sometimes tedious, operations that are associated with a graphical user interface.

Charles Petzold, writer of Windows API books,[clarification needed] has said: "The original hello
world program in the Windows 1.0 SDK was a bit of a scandal. HELLO.C was about 150
lines long, and the HELLO.RC resource script had another 20 or so more lines. (...) Veteran
C programmers often curled up in horror or laughter when encountering the Windows hello-
world program."[13]

Over the years, various changes and additions were made to the Windows Operating System,
and the Windows API changed and grew to reflect this. The Windows API for Windows 1.0
supported fewer than 450 function calls, where in modern versions of the Windows API there
are thousands. However, in general, the interface remained fairly consistent, and an old
Windows 1.0 application will still look familiar to a programmer who is used to the modern
Windows API.[14]

An emphasis has been made by Microsoft on maintaining software backwards compatibility.

To achieve this, when developing a new version of Windows Microsoft sometimes had to
implement workarounds to allow compatibility with third-party software that used the
previous version's API in an undocumented or even (programmatically) illegal way.
Raymond Chen, a Microsoft developer who works on the Windows API, has said: "I could
probably write for months solely about bad things apps do and what we had to do to get them
to work again (often in spite of themselves). Which is why I get particularly furious when
people accuse Microsoft of maliciously breaking applications during OS upgrades. If any
application failed to run on Windows 95, I took it as a personal failure."[15]
One of the largest changes the Windows API underwent was the transition from Win16
(shipped in Windows 3.1 and older) to Win32 (Windows NT and Windows 95 and up).
While Win32 was originally introduced with Windows NT 3.1 and Win32s allowed usage of
a Win32 subset before Windows 95, it was not until Windows 95 that widespread porting of
applications to Win32 began. To ease the transition, in Windows 95, both for external
developers and for Microsoft itself, a complex scheme of API thunks was used that could
allow 32 bit code to call into 16 bit code and (for the majority of Win16 APIs) vice-versa.
Flat thunks allowed 32 bit code to call into 16 bit libraries, and the scheme was used
extensively inside Windows 95's libraries to avoid porting the whole OS to Win32 itself in
one chunk. In Windows NT, the OS was pure 32-bit (except the parts for compatibility with
16-bit applications), and only generic thunks were available to thunk from Win16 to Win32,
as for Windows 95. The Platform SDK shipped with a compiler that could produce the code
necessary for these thunks.

[edit] Versions
Almost every new version of Microsoft Windows has introduced its own additions and
changes to the Windows API.[16] The name of the API however was kept consistent between
different Windows version, and name changes were kept limited to major architectural and
platform changes for Windows. Microsoft eventually changed the name of the then current
Win32 API family into Windows API, and made it into a catch-all term for both past and
future versions of the API.[2]

 Win16 is the API for the first, 16-bit versions of Microsoft Windows. These were
initially referred to as simply the Windows API, but were later renamed to Win16 in
an effort to distinguish it from the newer, 32-bit version of the Windows API. The
functions of Win16 API mainly reside in the core files of the OS: kernel.exe (or
krnl286.exe or krnl386.exe), user.exe and gdi.exe. Despite the file extension of exe,
these actually are dynamically linked libraries.
 Win32 is the 32-bit API for modern versions of Windows. The API consists of
functions implemented, as with Win16, in system DLLs. The core DLLs of Win32 are
kernel32.dll, user32.dll, and gdi32.dll. Win32 was introduced with Windows NT. The
version of Win32 that was shipped with Windows 95 was initially referred to as
Win32c, with the "c" standing for "compatibility", but this term was later abandoned
by Microsoft in favour of Win32.
 Win32s is an extension for the Windows 3.1x family of Microsoft Windows that
implemented a subset of the Win32 API for these systems. The "s" stands for
"subset".
 Win32 for 64-bit Windows, previously known as Win64, is the variant of the API
implemented on 64-bit platforms of the Windows architecture (currently AMD64 and
IA64.)[17][18][19] There are no new user-mode functions specific to the 64-bit platform,
so both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of an application can be still compiled from a single
codebase, although some older APIs have been deprecated. All memory pointers are
64-bit by default (the LLP64 model), so the source code has to be checked for
compatibility with 64-bit pointer arithmetic and rewritten as necessary.[20]

[edit] Other implementations

Although Microsoft's implementation of the Windows API is copyrighted, it is generally
accepted due to legal precedents[21] in the United States that other vendors can emulate
Windows by providing an identical API without breaching copyright.

The Wine project is an attempt to provide a Win32 API compatibility layer for Unix-like
platforms. ReactOS goes a step further and aims to provide an implementation of the entire
Windows operating system, working closely with the Wine project to promote code re-use
and compatibility. DosWin32 and HX DOS-Extender are other projects which emulate the
Windows API allowing the execution of simple Windows programs from a DOS command
line. Odin is a project to emulate Win32 on top of OS/2.

[edit] Compiler support

To develop software that utilizes the Windows API, a compiler must be able to handle and
import the Microsoft-specific DLLs and COM-objects. The compiler must either handle the
header files that expose the interior API function names, or supply such files by itself. For
certain classes of applications, the compiler system should also be able to handle IDL
(interface definition language) files. Collectively, these prerequisites (compilers, tools,
libraries, and headers) are known as the Microsoft Platform SDK. For a long time the
Microsoft Visual Studio family of compilers and tools and Borland's compilers were the only
tools that could provide this (although at least in the case of Windows, the SDK itself is
downloadable for free separately from the entire IDE suite, from Microsoft Platform SDK
Update). Nowadays the MinGW and Cygwin projects also provide such an environment
based on the GNU Compiler Collection, using a stand-alone header file collection to make
linking against Microsoft DLLs possible. LCC-Win32 is a "free for non-commercial use" C
compiler maintained by Jacob Navia. Pelles C is a free C compiler maintained by Pelle
Orinius. Free Pascal is a GPL Object Pascal compiler capable of writing software based on
the Windows API. MASM32 is a mature project to support the Windows API utilizing the 32
bit Microsoft assembler with custom made or converted headers and libraries from the
Platform SDK.

Windows specific compiler support is also required for the Structured Exception Handling
feature (SEH). This system serves a dual purpose: it provides a substrate upon which
language-specific exception handling can be implemented, and it is how the kernel notifies
applications of exceptional conditions such as dereferencing an invalid pointer or stack
overflow. The Microsoft/Borland C++ compilers had the ability to use this system as soon as
it was introduced in Windows 95 and NT, however the actual implementation was
undocumented and had to be reverse engineered for the Wine project and free compilers.
SEH is based on pushing exception handler frames onto the stack, then adding them to a
linked list stored in thread local storage (the first field of the thread environment block).
When an exception is thrown, the kernel and base libraries unwind the stack running handlers
and filters as they are encountered. Eventually, every exception unhandled by the application
itself will be dealt with by the default backstop handler which pops up the Windows common
crash dialog.