Supporting NT4/9X? (Accounting for API differences)

[Glenn9999]

I was wondering what everyone thought on that one. Is there a case that you are exposed to where trying to support an older generation of the Win32 API besides XP or Vista? I've run into a couple of cases lately where I am starting to wonder if the effort of getting code like those two cases to work on 9X is worth the return on it.

For example, one case was trying to get the PC speaker to work on 9X in a CRT equivalent. Finally, I ended up finding some ASM code that would drive the PC speaker (you'd be surprised how much buggy code is out there on the web), so I coded a part that would use the ASM code if the OS was 9X and Windows.Beep() if it was NT. Even then I'm not sure it was sufficient.

So I'm wondering if it would be valuable to just simply make code work on XP and then write a small unit to block loading a program if it's not NT/XP or above and call it done.

So, any thoughts to offer? Or do most people generally not have to worry about supporting multiple API platforms of Windows. Even between XP and Vista I'm sure there are enough API differences to make the question of supporting them something to ponder. So how have you all approached this issue?

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[whosrdaddy]

due to the increased security risk 9X/Me/NT4 is banned from our company and most companies I work with. So I make 2000/XP/Vista a requirement for all the software I write.
Never had any issues between 9X/NT4 though. As I make services for a living, I started to make them on the NT platform, never done those on 9x.

Vista is another can of worms:

the elevated privilige issue is the one I have encountered several times. And then the GUI differences are also noteworthy:

http://www.installationexcellence.com/articles/VistaWithDelphi/Index.html

this site covers them all. D2007 is supposed to support vista and for other versions but you must do some extra work (like the link above):

http://blogs.codegear.com/seppybloom/2007/03/22/33420

http://www.theabsolute.net/sware/delphivista.html

/Daddy


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