Daily Archives: March 6, 2007

Setting the minimum Windows version supported (C++)

Recently, I was trying to use the Shell function SHGetFolderPath. Despite including the correct header file (shlobj.h), the compiler wasn’t recognizing it. My code looked like this:

CString strPath; HRESULT hResult = SHGetFolderPath( NULL, CSIDL_APPDATA, NULL, SHGFP_TYPE_CURRENT, strPath.GetBufferSetLength(MAX_PATH)); strPath.ReleaseBuffer();

What I did was lookup the definition of SHGFP_TYPE_CURRENT in shlobj.h, and found this:

#if (NTDDI_VERSION >= NTDDI_WIN2K) SHSTDAPI_(void) SHFlushSFCache(void); typedef enum { SHGFP_TYPE_CURRENT = 0, // current value for user, verify it exists SHGFP_TYPE_DEFAULT = 1, // default value, may not exist } SHGFP_TYPE; SHFOLDERAPI SHGetFolderPathA(HWND hwnd, int csidl, HANDLE hToken, DWORD dwFlags, __out_ecount(MAX_PATH) LPSTR pszPath); SHFOLDERAPI SHGetFolderPathW(HWND hwnd, int csidl, HANDLE hToken, DWORD dwFlags, __out_ecount(MAX_PATH) LPWSTR pszPath); //etc...

It’s that first line that got me. My DDI version wasn’t >= that of Win2k’s. The solution is to modify the stdafx.h file. Before, it read:

#ifndef _WIN32_WINNT #define _WIN32_WINNT 0x0400 #endif

That 0x0400 defines Windows 95 as the minimum supported OS. I don’t really care about 9x support, so I changed it to read like this:

#ifndef _WIN32_WINNT //define Windows 2000 as minimum necessary OS #define _WIN32_WINNT 0x0500 #endif