About the Examples and the Companion CD-ROM

One thing you will notice about the first few examples is that they are implemented as console mode applications. Console mode applications are similar to the MS-DOS text mode applications from the 16-bit world, but they have some important differences. First these are true 32-bit applications. Second these applications can call dynamic-link libraries (DLLs) and other parts of the Win32 API with few exceptions. Finally the Windows 2000 service applications that I discuss are at their heart special-purpose console mode applications.

I created all of the examples on the companion CD-ROM with Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 and the July 1999 MSDN Library. All examples have been compiled and run on Windows 2000 using Release Candidate 1 (Build 2072). I created the ASP examples with Microsoft Visual InterDev. To run the ASP and ISAPI applications, you must have Internet Information Server (at least version 4 but preferably version 5, which comes with Windows 2000). Some of the examples use SQL Server. These examples will work just as well with the Microsoft Database Engine (which is available through http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/msde/download.asp ). Some examples use TCP/IP and thus require a functional network with TCP/IP installed and configured properly with a TCP/IP naming service of some kind (such as WINS or DNS) in place. (The readme file on the companion CD-ROM also contains a list of the software required to run the examples.)