By Larry Sand

Summary: It's an age old question: "How do I use a Windows API function that is not available in all versions of Windows?" The simple answer is that you only call the function if it's available at runtime. You do this by attempting to dynamically load the module where the function resides, and if that succeeds you call the function by address. If you can successfully load the module and get the address of the procedure, it exists in this version of Windows. There's no need to try to identify the version of Windows; either the function exists or it doesn't. In this article Larry Sand demonstrate this technique with some API calls that are only available in Windows 2000 and later, and which allow you to gradually fade in a window and make an area transparent or opaque.

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