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Puzzle 8
Playing Leapfrog |
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Windows provides the API function GetVersionEx to allow your application to determine the operating system version currently running. This issue of operating system version may seem unimportant and is relatively meaningless to those using Visual Basic alone. But the system version can be a critical piece of information to programmers using the Win32 API. Why? Because Microsoft keeps adding API functions to the operating system, and the version information is your best tool to make sure a function is available before you try to call it. |
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A Win32 application should degrade gracefully under older operating systems. In other words, if you take advantage of functionality provided by a newer system, such as NT 5.0, your application should not attempt to use that functionality on older systems. Rather, it should disable that part of the application, use an alternate approach to providing the functionality, or terminate gracefully with a not-too-annoying suggestion that the user upgrade his system. |
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Figure P8-1:
Each operating system version supports a different subset of
the Win32 API |
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