Answer Posted / kuldeep raaj sharma
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. All Windows programs must
interact with the Windows API regardless of the language.
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.
---
The functionality provided by the Windows API can be
grouped into eight categories:
--
[1]Base Services
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 and advapi32.dll
on 32-bit Windows.
--
[2] 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.
--
[3] Graphics Device Interface
Provide the 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.
--
[4]User Interface
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).
--
[5] Common Dialog Box Library
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.
--
[6] Common Control Library
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.
--
[7][8] Windows Shell
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 and later in
Windows 95 shlwapi.dll on 32-bit Windows. It is grouped
under the User Interface category of the API.
--
[9] Network Services
Give access to the various networking capabilities of the
operating system. Its sub-components include NetBIOS,
Winsock, NetDDE, RPC and many others.
----
Almost every new version of Microsoft Windows has
introduced its own additions and changes to the Windows API.
[14] 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.[15]
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. In Windows
NT 4.0 and its successors (including all modern Windows
versions), Win32 calls are executed by two modules,
csrss.exe (Client/Server Runtime Server Subsystem) in user
mode and win32k.sys in kernel mode.[citation needed]
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.)[16][17]
[18] 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 [19].
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