Support the Universal Naming Convention (UNC)

[This is preliminary documentation and subject to change.]

Requirement   (Designed for Microsoft® Windows® Logo)

Your application must support the Uniform Naming Convention (UNC). UNC paths allow logical connections to network devices without the need to specifically reference a network drive letter.

Your application must work seamlessly in a network environment but is not necessarily required to be network aware. Your application must be able to locate the network server and path with the UNC name even over a modem connection.

Supporting UNC does not mean that the application is disallowed from presenting network drive letters to users. It merely means that the user must have the option of using only the UNC path name.

Remarks

A long file name (LFN) is 260 characters long, which generally includes:

• 3 bytes for "<driveletter>:\"
• 255 bytes for the file name and extension
• 2 bytes for the null terminator

A UNC path has 2 bytes for "\\" instead of 3 bytes for "<driveletter>:\", and the path may not include an extension (file type).

Exception

Non-File-Based Applications are not required to provide UNC support.

See Also

See Pretesting UNC and LFN support for a description of pretesting you can do to ensure that your application provides proper UNC and LFN support.