The world of wide characters aka Unicode

Wide characters aka unicode characters are characters that occupy 16 bits per character .
In C we have a header file specifically for that .



that contains special data type for that

wchar_t

wchar_t * text = L"Hello";

is used to tell the compiler that it should use 16 bit aka wide variants of characters.

strlen for wide characters becomes wcslen .

To take care of these problems windows provides TCHAR.H

it contains many functions starting with _t , like. ..

_tprintf


by defining _UNICODE

like

#define _UNICODE

its possible to use 16 bit / 8 bit versions of functions without much verbosity .

the same _t functions then correctly map on to their 8 bit and 16 bit counter parts.

Hello Windows Facts

windows.h is the mother of all other header files in windows . It includes other header files .

Windef.h => basic type defintions

winnt.h => type definitions for unicode support.

winbase.h => kernel functions.

winusr.h => user interface functions

wingdi.h => graphics device interface functions.

WINAPI => is a naming convention like __stdcall .