Windows CSV API for 16 and 32-Bit Windows

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

SUMMARY

Windows CSV Overview

Windows CSV 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 CSV specification will be considered "Windows CSV compliant." To be Windows CSV compliant, a vendor must implement 100 percent of this Windows CSV specification. Suppliers of such interfaces shall be referred to as "Windows CSV suppliers."

Applications that are capable of exploiting any Windows CSV implementation will be considered as having a "Windows CSV interface" and will be referred to as "Windows CSV 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 CSV implementations and Windows CSV applications in both 16 and 32-bit operating environments.

Windows CSV makes provisions for multithreaded Windows-based processes. A process contains one or more threads of execution. In the Win16 non- threaded 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 CSV are provided for maximum programming compatibility between Windows 3.x and Windows NT and optimum application performance in both environments.

WINCSV can be found in the Software/Data Library by searching on the word WINCSV, the Q number of this article, or S13714. WINCSV was archived using the PKware file-compression utility.