NTSTATUS? Wazzat?

NTSTATUS: STATUS_GENERAL_INFORMATION

In recent times, I've met a fair number of people in software development who work on Microsoft Windows who go "Win32 API? What's that?" I guess it is that people just don't, or can get by without needing to know what that is, let alone use it. I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with that. Just sign o' the times, I guess. Also a sign of what kind of development is being done more pervasively nowadays.

In this blog, unless specified, 'Windows' (as in Microsoft Windows) will generally refer to WindowsNT, and usually NT5.1 (Windows XP), and NT6.0 (Windows Vista) unless specified. I still have some good memories of Windows 9x, but they are few and far between.

So, for those who don't already know, the calling convention alias for the Win32 API is WINAPI, and the standard error does not have a special type definition. One more layer down, in Window's kernel-mode, where the neat NT Native API is used, the calling convention is NTAPI, and the standard return type is NTSTATUS.

And then, WINAPI and NTAPI is the stdcall calling convention of Intel's x86 architecture, and NTSTATUS is an unsigned 32-bit (unless you're into 64-bit) type.

Well, so that's that. Let's see if there will be anything randomly interesting coming up...