Talk:Windows API

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by ItsProgrammable (talk | contribs) at 21:46, 25 November 2006 (Forgot the I). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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Internet Explorer Integration

"Internet Explorer has been an integrated component of the operating system since Windows 98, and provides web related services to applications [10]. The integration will stop with Windows Vista."

This seems to contradict Microsoft's publications

Windows API not property of Microsoft

"Windows API is basically considered not the property of Microsoft as is its implementation."

What does this mean?
Better now? -- Tim Starling 01:43 26 May 2003 (UTC)

ExitWindows

This "function" is actually a macro that calls the ExitWindowsEx function. I propose removing it from the list to avoid confusion early on. We could replace it with a function that is more commonly used, as this function is not very commonly used by applications developers anyway. SteveS 22:07, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

History

The history section here does not make much sense grammatically and needs expansion and cleanup. Dsav 06:41, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

clean up?

For such a widely used api, this page seems to be a bit barren. I'm going to see how much I can clean it up in a few weeks, because I can see why the cleanup tag was added. I certainly wouldn't mind it if anyone was looking over my shoulder while I do so, since I am rather new to wikipedia writing :).--Codemonkey 09:49, 19 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I completely rewrote the history section. I still have to add a paragraph on the big win16->win32 move and the introduction of a 64-bit version of the API. Overall though, I've tried to err on the side of too much information, so some of it may need to be trimmed down a bit eventually. Any comments, if anyone is reading this, would be appreciated. --Codemonkey 16:42, 27 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
If nobody objects, I'm going to remove the cleanup tag in a couple of days. --Codemonkey 18:43, 29 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I've gone ahead and removed the cleanup tag. I'm not quite finished with this article yet, but I think it has been cleaned up enough to warrant removal of the tag. If anyone disagrees, feel free to put the cleanup tag back up again. --Codemonkey 17:20, 4 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

To do

I've had a short to do list for a while on my userpage on what I still wanted to do on this article. I haven't had too much time to do it, so I've moved it over to this page, and expanded it a bit. Feel free to add to the list, or make comments if I listed something stupid on it. Also, for reference, I got this reply on my userpage todo list: User talk:Codemonkey#WinAPI_compiler_support, from User:tyomitch. --Codemonkey 20:15, 8 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

.NET

Doesn't the .NET winFX unnecessarily complicate it? Pretty much the only thing they have in common are that they are "an" API and run on "Windows" (and the latter even is not fully decided). "The windows API" is the native one. The .NET api's are different ones, I'd keep that apart.

Yeah, I'd agree. The "Windows API" to me means the C/C++ and maybe the VB APIs, but .NET is entirely new and is no more "Windows" than Java is. The only parts that are really Win32 specific are S.W.F and some of the low level OS semantics. Maybe that section should just be dropped, or rewritten to point to the main .net article?
Yes, I also agree. I just removed a paragraph about Mono (mentioned as Win API implementation in error). .NET is (like Java or Mono) a platform independent virtual machine and object-oriented application framework. See, Windows API has nothing to do with a virtual machine at all and doesn't encapsulate functionality into objects. .NET is on the other hand not mandatory depending on Windows API. Of course it uses native API of the host OS, but that may be an API under Linux or Mac (as soon as .NET supports those systems), too. Furthermore, .NET does not allow to do all you can do with the Windows API, because some of the Windows API functions are (of course) not platform independend and also considered "unsafe". This diskussion shows there is confusion about Windows API and .NET. So in my opinion it would make sense to clearly state how different they are. .NET is no "Windows API Version 2". --82.83.68.136 21:10, 8 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

As there is great demand on mentioning .NET in the article, I put a note about .NET into the "Wrapper Libraries" section. .NET wrapps many of the Windows API functions, like all application frameworks and programming languages under windows do. Maybe (someday) Microsoft will merge the Windows API into .NET, but that's not relevant today. Maybe Microsoft also will merge the Native API into .NET someday, if mankind persists on earth long enough. No need to diskuss that in this article. ;) -- 213.169.107.51 09:10, 10 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Other implementations

I removed the citation needed tag from this section - it *is* generally accepted (I have worked on the leading reimplementation of Win32 for years), although if you wanted the legal precedence for this you would have to dig out the Sega case where it was shown that header files cannot be copyrighted.

More specifically, you cannot legally copyright an interface, only an implementation (which the Sega dispute formalised in case law). Therefore because Win32 is an interface (usually but not always paired with the Windows implementation) you can reimplement it legally.

Again I am not sure what you could cite to prove this in the case of Win32 specifically. It's just how copyright law works.

MikeHearn 11:13, 4 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

IMimeMessage merge

I don't think IMimeMessage should be merged here; instead, I think the IMimeMessage article should be deleted. -- Mikeblas 16:45, 21 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

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