Windows CPI-C API for 16 and 32-Bit Windows

• Microsoft Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows version 3.1

SUMMARY

Windows CPI-C Overview

Windows CPI-C defines a standard and consistent API for the 16 and 32-bit versions of the Microsoft Windows graphical environment. It encompasses a set of Windows-specific extensions designed to allow the programmer to take advantage of the message-driven nature of the Windows graphical environment.

This API has been designed and specified to provide a standard to which application developers can program and network software vendors can conform. These API details constitute documentation for application software developers and a specification for network software vendors.

Network software that conforms to this Windows CPI-C specification will be considered "Windows CPI-C compliant." To be Windows CPI-C compliant, a vendor must implement 100 percent of this Windows CPI-C specification. Suppliers of such interfaces shall be referred to as "Windows CPI-C suppliers."

Applications that are capable of exploiting any Windows CPI-C implementation will be considered as having a "Windows CPI-C interface" and will be referred to as "Windows CPI-C applications."

While this is one of the WinSNA APIs to be standardized for the Windows environment, it is beyond the scope of this document to deal with other SNA (Systems Network Architecture) APIs.

Microsoft Windows Graphical Environment and Windows-Specific Extensions

This API has been designed for ALL implementations and versions of the Windows environment from and including version 3.0. It thus provides for Windows CPI-C implementations and Windows CPI-C applications in both 16 and 32-bit operating environments.

Windows CPI-C makes provisions for multithreaded Windows-based processes. A process contains one or more threads of execution. In the Win16 non- multithreaded world, a task corresponds to a process with a single thread. All references to threads in this document refer to actual "threads" in multithreaded Windows environments. In non-multithreaded environments (such as version 3.0), use of the term thread refers to a Windows process.

The extensions to the Windows environment included in Windows CPI-C are provided for maximum programming compatibility between Windows 3.x and Windows NT and optimum application performance in both environments.

WINCPIC can be found in the Software/Data Library by searching on the word WINCPIC, the Q number of this article, or S13712. WINCPIC was archived using the PKware file-compression utility.