Porting to Win32¿: A Guide to Making Your Applications Ready for the 32-Bit Future of Windows¿

and Overview book: to undertake an expedition into these new and to a large extent unexplored territories, explaining along the way what all these things mean to existing programs and their native use under Win32 systems. After all, before putting such nice things as multiple threads or Unicode into their applications, developers have to port them to Win32 in the first place! And this is, in spite of all the promises from Microsoft, somewhat more difficult than I'd expected - at the very least in certain sections. The book is not focused so much on the detailed explanation of all the new functions and possibilities (these won't escape you anyway!); rather, its main concern is to make the transition from 16 to 32 bit as easy and smooth as possible for you as the developer and/or project lead. So, let's have a closer look at the individual parts of the text! Chapter 1: Fundamental The first chapter is for project leads and developers alike. It gives an Aspects and Preliminary overview of the new Win32 systems, describes the most important fea- Considerations tures, and compares them with Win16 and also with the competition coming along in the form of OS/2 3. x and UNIX. I'll show the important architectural and implementation issues, concentrating on Windows NT and detailing the differences for Windows 95 when required.