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Windows API
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Windows API, informally WinAPI, is Microsoft's core set of application programming interfaces (APIs)
available in the Microsoft Windows operating systems. The name Windows API collectively refers to several
different platform implementations that are often referred to by their own names (for example, Win32 API);
see the versions section. Almost all Windows programs interact with the Windows API. On the Windows NT
line of operating systems, a small number (such as programs started early in the Windows startup process) use
the Native API.[1]

Developer support is available in the form of a software development kit, Microsoft Windows SDK, providing
documentation and tools needed to build software based on the Windows API and associated Windows
interfaces.

The Windows API (Win32) is focused mainly on the programming language C[2] in that its exposed functions
and data structures are described in that language in recent versions of its documentation. However, the API
may be used by any programming language compiler or assembler able to handle the (well-defined) low-level
data structures along with the prescribed calling conventions for calls and callbacks. Similarly, the internal
implementation of the API's function has been developed in several languages, historically.[3] Despite the fact
that C is not an object-oriented programming language, the Windows API and Windows have both historically
been described as object-oriented. There have also been many wrapper classes and extensions (from Microsoft
and others) for object-oriented languages that make this object-oriented structure more explicit (Microsoft
Foundation Class Library (MFC), Visual Component Library (VCL), GDI+, etc.). For instance, Windows 8
provides the Windows API and the WinRT API, which is implemented in C++[4] and is object-oriented by
design.[4]

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

Overview
The functions provided by the Windows API can be grouped into eight categories:[5]

Base Services
[6] Provide access to the basic resources available to a Windows system. Included are things like file
systems, devices, processes, 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

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Provide access to functions beyond 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
[7] Provides functions to output graphics 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.[8]
User Interface
[9] Provides the functions to create and manage screen windows and most basic controls, such as buttons
and scrollbars, receive mouse and keyboard input, and other functions associated with the graphical user
interface (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
[10] Provides applications the standard dialog boxes to open and save files, choose 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
[11] 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 dynamic-link library
(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
[12][13] Component of the Windows API allows applications to access functions provided by the
operating system shell, and to 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
[14] Give access to the various networking abilities of the operating system. Its subcomponents include
NetBIOS, Winsock, NetDDE, remote procedure call (RPC) and many more. This component resides in
netapi32.dll on 32-bit Windows.

Web

The Internet Explorer (IE) web browser also exposes many APIs that are often used by applications, and as
such could be considered a part of the Windows API. IE has been included with the operating system since
Windows 95 OSR2 and has provided web-related services to applications since Windows 98.[15] Specifically, it
is used to provide:

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

The URL moniker 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.
An HTTP client library which also takes into account system-wide Proxy settings (wininet.dll); however,
Microsoft has added another HTTP client library called winhttp.dll which is smaller and more suitable
for some applications.
A library to assist 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 Books.

Multimedia

The classic windows Multimedia API is placed in winmm.dll and contains functions to play sound files, to send
and receive MIDI messages, to access joysticks, and to facilitate all other features of the so-called MCI
subsystem of Windows, which originates from the Multimedia Extensions available for Windows 3.0 separately
and as an integral part of the operating system since Windows 3.1, at which time they were located in
mmsystem.dll.
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Apart from that, as part of every Windows version since Windows 95 OSR2, Microsoft has provided the
DirectX APIs — a loosely related set of graphics and gaming services, which includes:

Direct2D for hardware-accelerated 2D vector graphics.

Direct3D for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics.
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.

Microsoft also provides several APIs for media encoding and playback:

DirectShow, which builds and runs generic multimedia pipelines. It is comparable to the GStreamer
framework and often used to render in-game videos and build media players (Windows Media Player is
based on it). DirectShow is no longer recommended for game development.
Media Foundation, a newer digital media API intended to replace DirectShow.

Program interaction

The Windows API is designed mostly for the interaction between the operating system and an application. For
communication among different Windows applications, 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 much overlap.

The variety of terms is basically the result of grouping software mechanisms that relate to a given aspect of
software development. Automation specifically relates to exporting the function of an application or component
(as an application programming interface (API)) so that it can be controlled by other applications instead of by
human users only, .NET is a self-contained general methodology and technology to develop desktop and web
applications written in a variety of just-in-time (JIT) compiled languages.

Windows.pas is a Pascal/Delphi unit which contains the Windows-specific API declarations. It is the Pascal
equivalent to windows.h, used in C.[16]

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 to interact 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 smaller alternative to MFC.

Most application frameworks for Windows (at least partly) wrap the Windows API. Thus, the .NET Framework
and Java, likewise 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.[17]

History
The Windows API has always exposed a large part of the underlying structure of the Windows systems to
programmers. This had the advantage of giving them much flexibility and power over their applications, but
also creates great responsibility in how applications handle various low-level, sometimes tedious, operations
that are associated with a graphical user interface.

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For example, a beginning C programmer will often write the simple "hello world" as their first assignment. The
working part of the program is only a single printf line within the main subroutine. The overhead for linking to
the standard I/O library is also only one line:

#include<stdio.h>
int main()
{
printf("Hello World");
}

The Windows version was still only one working line of code but it required many, many more lines of
overhead. Charles Petzold, who wrote several books about programming for the Windows API, 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 programmers often
curled up in horror or laughter when encountering the Windows hello-world program."[18]

Over the years, various changes and additions were made to Windows systems, and the Windows API changed
and grew to reflect this.[19] The Windows API for Windows 1.0 supported fewer than 450 function calls,
whereas modern versions of the Windows API support 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.[20]

Microsoft has made an effort to maintain backward compatibility. To achieve this, when developing new
versions of Windows, Microsoft sometimes implemented workarounds to allow compatibility with third-party
software that used the prior version in an undocumented or even inadvisable 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."[21]

One of the largest changes to the Windows API 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 use 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, for developers
outside and inside Microsoft, a complex scheme of API thunks was used that could allow 32-bit code to call
into 16-bit code (for most of Win16 APIs) and 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 in one batch. In Windows NT, the OS was pure 32-bit, except 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 needed for these thunks. Versions of 64-bit
Windows are also able to run 32-bit applications via WoW64. The SysWOW64 folder located in the Windows
folder on the OS drive contains several tools to support 32-bit applications.

Versions
Almost every new version of Microsoft Windows has introduced its own additions and changes to the Windows
API.[22] The name of the API, however, remained consistent between different Windows versions, 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 API versions.[5]

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 them from the
newer, 32-bit version of the Windows API. The functions of Win16 API reside in mainly 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 dynamic-link libraries.
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Win32 is the 32-bit application programming interface (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
shipped with Windows 95 was initially referred to as Win32c, with c meaning compatibility. This term
was later abandoned by Microsoft in favor 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".
Win64 is the variant of the API implemented on 64-bit platforms of the Windows architecture (as of
2011 x86-64 (AMD64) and IA-64).[23][24][25] Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of an application can be
still compiled from one codebase, although some older APIs have been deprecated, and some of the APIs
that were already deprecated in Win32 were removed. All memory pointers are 64-bit by default (the
LLP64 model), so the source code must be checked for compatibility with 64-bit pointer arithmetic and
rewritten as necessary.[26]
WinCE is the implementation of the Windows API for the Windows CE operating system.

Other implementations
The Wine Is Not an Emulator (Wine) project provides a Win32 API compatibility layer for Unix-like platforms,
between Linux kernel API and programs written for the Windows API. ReactOS goes a step further and aims to
implement the full 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 to
allow executing simple Windows programs from a DOS command line. Odin is a project to emulate Win32 on
OS/2, superseding the original Win-OS/2 emulation which was based on Microsoft code. Other minor
implementations include the MEWEL and Zinc libraries which were intended to implement a subset of the
Win16 API on DOS (see List of platform-independent GUI libraries).

Windows Interface Source Environment (WISE) was a licensing program from Microsoft which allowed
developers to recompile and run Windows-based applications on Unix and Macintosh platforms. WISE SDKs
were based on an emulator of the Windows API that could run on those platforms.[27]

Efforts toward standardization included Sun's Public Windows Interface (PWI) for Win16 (see also: Sun
Windows Application Binary Interface (Wabi)), Willows Software's Application Programming Interface for
Windows (APIW) for Win16 and Win32 (see also: Willows TWIN), and ECMA-234, which attempted to
standardize the Windows API bindingly.

Compiler support
To develop software that uses the Windows API, a compiler must be able to use the Microsoft-specific DLLs
listed above (COM-objects are outside Win32 and assume a certain vtable layout). The compiler must either
handle the header files that expose the interior API function names, or supply such files.

For the language C++, Zortech (later Symantec, then Digital Mars), Watcom and Borland have all produced
well known commercial compilers that have been used often with Win16, Win32s, and Win32. Some of them
supplied memory extenders, allowing Win32 programs to run on Win16 with Microsoft's redistributable
Win32s DLL. The Zortech compiler was probably one of the first stable and usable C++ compilers for
Windows programming, before Microsoft had a C++ compiler.

For certain classes of applications, the compiler system should also be able to handle interface description
language (IDL) files. Collectively, these prerequisites (compilers, tools, libraries, and headers) are known as the
Microsoft Platform SDK. For a time, the Microsoft Visual Studio and Borland's integrated development system
were the only integrated development environments (IDEs) that could provide this (although, the SDK is
downloadable for free separately from the entire IDE suite, from Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7 and
.NET Framework 4 (http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=8279)).

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As of 2016, the MinGW and Cygwin projects also provide such an environment based on the GNU Compiler
Collection (GCC), using a stand-alone header file set, to make linking against the Win32-specific DLLs simple.
LCC-Win32 is a C compiler maintained by Jacob Navia, freeware for non-commercial use. Pelles C is a
freeware C compiler maintained by Pelle Orinius. Free Pascal is a free software Object Pascal compiler that
supports the Windows API. The MASM32 package is a mature project providing support for the Windows API
under Microsoft Macro Assembler (MASM) by using custom made or converted headers and libraries from the
Platform SDK. Flat assembler FASM allows building Windows programs without using an external linker, even
when running on Linux.

Windows specific compiler support is also needed for Structured Exception Handling (SEH). This system
serves two purposes: it provides a substrate on 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
will be dealt with by the default backstop handler, which pops up the Windows common crash dialog.

See also
Interix
Linux kernel API
Microsoft Windows library files
Windows legacy audio components

Notes
1. Microsoft TechNet (November 2006). Inside Native Applications. (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sys
internals/bb897447.aspx) Retrieved December 24, 2008.
2. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb384843.aspx
3. Both the languages Pascal and x86 assembly had been heavily used in earlier versions of the Windows
API, before C became dominant. A reminiscence of this is that the API functions still use the Pascal
calling convention to restore the stack from pushed parameters after a call (although they expect
parameters pushed from right to left, as most C compilers do, by default).
4. Mayberry, Michael (2012). WinRT Revealed. New York City: Apress. p. 3. ISBN 978-1-4302-4585-8.
5. Microsoft Developer Network (July 2005). Overview of the Windows API. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/lib
rary/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/winprog/winprog/overview_of_the_windows_api.asp) Retrieved
August 28, 2005.
6. Microsoft Developer Network (July 2005). Base Services. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.as
p?url=/library/en-us/winprog/winprog/base_services.asp) Retrieved August 28, 2005.
7. Microsoft Developer Network (July 2005). Graphics Device Interface. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/librar
y/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/winprog/winprog/graphics_device_interface.asp) Retrieved August 28,
2005.
8. "G" (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms789535.aspx). Microsoft Developer Network. Retrieved
2009-01-28.
9. Microsoft Developer Network (July 2005). User Interface. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.as
p?url=/library/en-us/winprog/winprog/user_interface.asp) Retrieved August 28, 2005.
10. Microsoft Developer Network (2005). Common Dialog Box Library. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/
default.asp?url=/library/en-us/winui/winui/windowsuserinterface/userinput/commondialogboxlibrary.as
p) Retrieved September 22, 2005.
11. Microsoft Developer Network (July 2005). Common Control Library. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/
default.asp?url=/library/en-us/winprog/winprog/common_control_library.asp) Retrieved August 28,
2005.

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12. Microsoft Developer Network (July 2005). Windows Shell. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.as

p?url=/library/en-us/winprog/winprog/windows_shell.asp) Retrieved August 28, 2005.
13. Microsoft Developer Network (2005). Shell Programmer's Guide. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/def
ault.asp?url=/library/en-us/shellcc/platform/shell/programmersguide/shell_intro.asp) Retrieved August
28, 2005.
14. Microsoft Developer Network (July 2005). Network Services. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/a
a969177) Retrieved August 28, 2005.
15. Microsoft Developer Network (January 2006); Programming and reusing the browser (http://msdn.micro
soft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/browser/prog_browser_node_entry.asp) Retrieved January
22, 2006.
16. Texeira, Steve and Xavier Pacheco (2002). Borland Delphi 6 Developer's Guide (https://books.google.co
m/books?id=9JzBn4vcUBoC&lpg=PA253&dq=%22windows.pas%22&pg=PA253#v=onepage&q=%22
windows.pas%22&f=false). Sams. p. 253. ISBN 0672321157.
17. Windows API Code Pack for Microsoft .NET Framework (http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/WindowsAPI
CodePack)
18. Charles Petzold (December 2001). Programming Microsoft Windows with C#. Microsoft Press. Beyond
the Console, page 47.
19. Detailed analysis of changes in the Windows API from XP to 10. (http://abi-laboratory.pro/index.php?vie
w=winapi) Retrieved September 08, 2016.
20. Charles Petzold (November 11, 1998). Programming Windows, Fifth Edition. Microsoft Press. APIs and
Memory Models, page 9.
21. Raymond Chen (October 15, 2003). What about BOZOSLIVEHERE and
TABTHETEXTOUTFORWIMPS? (http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/10/15/55296.aspx)
Retrieved August 27, 2005.
22. The Iseran Project (1996–2001). History of the Windows API. (http://web.archive.org/web/200208020815
10/http://www.iseran.com/Win32/FAQ/history.html) Retrieved October 7, 2005.
23. Nomenclature of released 64-bit versions includes Windows XP Professional x64 Edition and x64
Editions of Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 on the x86-64 (AMD64)
platform, and Windows 2000 Server Limited Edition, Windows XP 64-bit Edition, Windows Advanced
Server 2003 for Itanium and Windows 2008 Advanced Server for Itanium on the IA-64 platform
24. "Windows XP Professional x64 Edition home page" (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/64bit/).
Microsoft.
25. "Microsoft 64-bit Computing Overview" (http://www.microsoft.com/servers/64bit/). Microsoft.
26. "MSDN: Getting Ready for 64-bit Windows" (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa384198(VS.8
5).aspx). Microsoft.
27. WISE (http://hyper.sunjapan.com.cn/~hz/win32/wise.htm)

References
1. Windows application programming interface (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms809754.aspx)

External links
MSDN Windows API (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc433218%28VS.85%29.aspx)
Advanced Win32 api newsgroup (news://comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.win32)
French Win32 api newsgroup (news://fr.comp.os.ms-windows.programmation)
Windows API Code Pack for Microsoft .NET Framework (http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/WindowsAPI
CodePack)
ECMA-234 (http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-234.htm) – ECMA
standard for a subset of the Windows API

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