[perl-win32-gui-users] Various windows versions: determining at runtime for type compatibility

[Plum, J. <jp...@ba...>]

Hey everyone:

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A while ago, Rob and I were in a discussion about how to allow a single
compiled ppm of Win32-GUI to manage to work with all the available
features to a particular OS, dependant on the platform at runtime. There
is definitely a severe trick here in that for the most part, the
decision of which OS's capabilities to embrace has been defaulted to
95/NT4 level to ensure compatibility backwards to those platforms.

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However there are some nice little features available in 2000+ such as
the NotifyIcon's balloon tip (which we all know and hate because of that
annoying icon we've all got that is constantly popping useless crap).
While the data structure to use this feature is easily implemented via
Win32::API, or simply a mess of pack/unpack, the problem comes down to
the fact that the PPM was indeed compiled with a WINVER of 0x0400,
meaning 95/NT4.

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I was perusing a bit and began to wonder how we might bypass this,
enabling some of the nice feature sets made available in the latest OSes
from Microsoft.

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If anyone has any idea on how we can manage to compile with WINVER @
0x0600 (vista +) and then limit functionality and data structure version
@ runtime, I am sure myself and Rob would be glad to hear it. I am
working with a solution or two, but there are certainly some hindrances
from where my approach comes from.

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Jason P