Geoff Chappell - Software Analyst
From the very start, with version 4.00, COMCTL32 provided a set of functions for easy storage of strings:
Though both functions date from the original Windows 95, neither was documented until late 2002 as Settlement Program Interfaces. Even then, Microsoft documented only one (and only the Unicode half of it), and declared it as requiring Windows 2000 as the minimum operating system.
As with much of the documentation that results from that settlement, Microsoft’s effort is extraordinarily grudging and miserly. This documentation comes with no overview of the functionality. Barely all that is offered is that for each function, such little information as a competent reader might discern from uncommented C-language prototypes is repackaged in the standard form of MSDN documentation. The C-language prototypes anyway do not seem to have been released (in COMMCTRL.H, as supplied with the Platform SDK) until 2003.