What is the Win32 API?
It is the 32 bit successor of the Win16 API: the Application Programming Interface which has been used for writing Windows programs since version 1.0. It is the combination of data types, definition and functions which C programmers include as a set of header files. Most of the functions are implemented in DLLs, to which applications link at run time -either directly or through COM interfaces. The core API divides into three sections: • KERNEL All the low level kernel services • GDI Graphics Device Interface: drawing and printing • USER User Interface controls, windows and messaging services Each is pretty much built on top of the other. In Windows 95 the services are provided by three DLLs -USER32, KERNEL32 and GDI32, which either implement the calls or pass them down to their 16 bit predecessors. In Windows NT many of the services are implemented in Kernel Mode and various forms of inter-process communication are used to manage this. To C++ programmers this is known as “the raw API”
