The Windows Environment

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The Windows Environment

Windows is a Graphical User Interface (GUI). It uses graphics to organize the user's workspace. User's choose items and execute programs by pointing and clicking with a mouse. The program that run from within Windows also have a Graphical User Interface (GUI); for example, MS-Excel and MS-Word. Moreover these programs can run only within Windows. This is because Windows provides these programs with a number of built in functions and data which are not available in other environments. The functions that are provided by windows include functions with the functionality to draw text in different sizes and styles using font data. Windows provides a broad range of graphical functions for drawing lines and geometric shapes and changing color. Windows program make use of these built in functions and do not have to be coded to perform these tasks.

These system defined functions that an application can call are provided by an interface known as the Application Program Interface (API) Every Windows environment has its unique API. For example, the API that Windows 95 supports (also called the Win32 interface) is a 32-bit API. All the functions supported by the API can work with 32 bits of information at any given time. Writing programs for the Windows environment using the API functions is referred to as SDK programming where SDK stands for Software Development Kit.