You Want Windows 98 Support in 2013?

A few weeks back I got an email from a chap in Australia who wanted to know if I could fix one of my DDE tools (DDE Command) to work under Windows 98 SE. After a quick check of the calendar to make sure I hadn’t entered a time warp I couldn’t help but be a little curious about where this mysterious Windows box was running and why it couldn’t be upgraded…

It turned out that this machine was fitted with a propriety ISA card (remember those?) for which support was discontinued in 1996! This chap seemed to be going through heroic efforts to keep it running by using Excel to grab data from the card via DDE. He then stumbled upon my command line tool which worked fine on Windows 7 (as it does right back to Windows 2000), but was failing on Windows 98 like this:-

C:\> ddecmd servers
ERROR: Failed to query DDE servers: DMLERR_DLL_NOT_INITIALIZED

I had not seen that kind of error before and it’s pretty fundamental too - the underlying DDEML library was apparently not initialised. All ddecmd commands seemed to report the same problem. Luckily I had more than an inkling of what it might be because the tool is pretty simple and my DDE classes have barely changed in over decade. Also I didn’t really fancy trying to cobble together a VM and source a Windows 98 licence just to help this chap out. One of the reasons I provide the source code to all my tools is exactly to allow someone to find their own (paid) support if I can’t accommodate them myself.

One of the key differences between the Windows 95/98/ME lineage and the NT/2K/XP/Vista/etc one is that the former is ANSI internally whereas the latter is Unicode. Naturally for backwards compatibility reasons the NT line can also run ANSI binaries too, with a slight overhead as it translates back and forth as required. One of the decisions I made back in February 2008 was to switch to Unicode builds by default; however the Windows build targets were still left as they were when I first ported my libraries to Win32 back in the mid ‘90’s!

#define WINVER         0x0400   //! Windows 95+
#define _WIN32_WINNT   0x0400   //! Windows NT 4.0+
#define _WIN32_WINDOWS 0x0400   //! Windows 95+
#define _WIN32_IE      0x0400   //! IE 4.0+

Luckily I have no need for anything more fancy, especially with my command line tools so it was a simpler matter of flicking the switch in Visual C++ (7.1, aka VS2003, is still my favoured version) and out popped an ANSI build. In the meantime because of the time lag between the UK and Australia I suggested to the chap that he download my GUI based DDE tool (DDEQuery) and try that. I’d remembered that this tool hasn’t been touched since 2005 and so the binary would have been an ANSI build anyway. Unsurprisingly, it worked. So I shipped off an ANSI build of DDE Command and it was “case closed”.

Every time I think it’s time to leave the past behind and get-with-the-program a question like this pops up and it feels great to still be able to support such an old OS. Although I still use VC++ 7.1 (on XP) for my personal C++ code, I still compile it with modern versions of VC++ and GCC to gain access to all that extra static analysis so that someone can just pick it up if needs be. My day job now consists of writing C# and although it’s currently .Net 3.5 I have my sights firmly set on .Net 4.5 and C# 5 as I’m no luddite.

Even though the corporate desktop standard is still Windows XP in many organisations and we now have to suffer all those annoying “you’re using an outdated browser version” banners, it feels good to know that there are others out there that have it so much worse.