Portable Windows Programming

Abstract

As we have already noticed, the Win32 API differs in some important basic properties from its 16-bit predecessor. Some of these changes (e.g., the use of memory areas greater than 64 KB, aka HUGE) can be handled often either completely transparently or needing only relatively small porting efforts (in this case simply removing the keyword HUGE or huge). Unfortunately, many other dissimilarities are considerably less “cooperative” and force the developer to perform possibly far-reaching changes on the existing source codes. And the precise character of all these changes will occupy us in this chapter. In section 1.5, on page 44,I presented an overview of the six categories into which the most important differences and the resulting modifications can be divided. Some hints to DLL programming under Win32 were also given there. This chapter (alas, by far the most voluminous of the book) elaborates on this overview and shows in detail and with lots of practical examples the most important programming-related differences between the 16- and 32-bit Windows environments.