Base Services

The base services functions give applications access to the resources of the computer and the features of the underlying operating system, such as memory, file systems, devices, processes, and threads. An application uses these functions to manage and monitor the resources it needs to complete its work. For example, an application uses memory management functions to allocate and free memory. Process management and synchronization functions start and coordinate the operation of multiple applications or multiple threads of execution within a single application.

The file I/O functions provide access to files, directories, and input and output (I/O) devices. These functions give applications access to files and directories on disks and other the storage devices on a specified computer and on computers in a network. The file I/O functions support a variety of file systems, including the FAT file system, the CD-ROM file system (CDFS), and NTFS.

Applications can share code or information with other applications. For example, they can make useful procedures available to all applications by placing these procedures in DLLs. Applications access these procedures by using DLL functions to load the libraries and retrieve the addresses of the procedures. Communications functions read from and write to communications ports as well as control the operating modes of these ports. For interprocess communication (IPC), there are DDE, pipe, mailslot, and file mapping functions.

Registry and initialization functions let applications store application-specific information in system files so that new instances of the application or even other applications can retrieve and use the information.

Applications handle special conditions during execution. For example, they can handle errors, log events, and handle exceptions. Applications can also use special functions to debug code and improve its performance. For example, the debugging functions permit single-step control of the execution of other processes, and the performance monitoring functions provide detailed information on process execution.

For more information, see the following overviews.

Atoms
Clipboard
Communications
Consoles and Character-Mode Support
Data Decompression Library
Debug Help Library
Debugging
Device Input and Output
Device Management
Dynamic Data Exchange
Dynamic Data Exchange Management Library
Dynamic-Link Libraries
Error Handling
Event Logging
File I/O
File Mapping
File Systems
Generic Thunks
Handles and Objects
Hooks
Image Help
Interprocess Communications
Mailslots
Memory Management
Network DDE
Performance Monitoring
Pipes
Power Management
Processes and Threads
PSAPI
Registry
Services
Structured Exception Handling
Synchronization
Tape Backup
Tool Help