Support of Legacy Windows Versions

[ludvikjerabek]

Firstly, this is a fantastic library and I am grateful for what you have created.

I just thought I would point it out that if you are trying to compile for older (legacy) version of windows you will get errors.

The lowest version of windows you the library works against is Windows 7
#define WINVER 0x0601
#define _WIN32_WINNT 0x0601

If you go to Windows XP or below you run into issues.

#define WINVER 0x0501
#define _WIN32_WINNT 0x0501

For example, RegGetValueW is not available.

This should be exceedingly rare, but you may want to consider which Windows Registry functions are available based on the WINVER & _WIN32_WINNT definition.

[GiovanniDicanio]

Thank you very much for your compliments on this library!

I know that currently Windows XP is not supported because the library uses RegGetValue (which requires Vista+, or Windows XP 64-bit) instead of RegQueryValueEx. This is something I may add in the future. But please consider that even Microsoft abandoned Windows XP: for example, the latest toolset that has Windows XP support is v141_xp, that is the XP toolset from Visual Studio 2017. It has full C++14 support, and partial C++17 support (which includes std::optional, std::variant, std::any, [[nodiscard]], etc.). (It comes with Visual Studio 2019, too.)

Unfortunately during all these years I haven't received any money or other financing for this library, so I work on it when I can.

[ludvikjerabek]

Yeah I totally get and know the feeling. Thanks for this awesome code either way. Definitely saved time not having to deal with releasing resources.

[GiovanniDicanio]

Thanks again!

Definitely saved time not having to deal with releasing resources.

Yes, and to be fair it's not only about not dealing with releasing resources, but also to abstract away low-level C-style structures like REG_MULTI_SZ with higher-level C++ features like std::vector<std::wstring>.

[ludvikjerabek]

Yes multi-string is very useful.