Unicode Windows

The level of internationalization support that you can expect from the operating system depends upon the version of the operating system running on your client machines. Windows NT 3.51, NT 4.0, 2000, XP, 2003, and Vista (formerly code-named "Longhorn") are all 32-bit Unicode platforms and support Unicode natively. ANSI functionality (which, in the Windows world, equates to Windows code page functionality) is also supported, but in most cases, ANSI functions "transcode" (translate from one character set to another) inputs to Unicode, call the Unicode API, and then convert the return value to ANSI before returning it to the caller.