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Comment by howdydoo | Hacker News Reader

> As of April 5th 2017 with the release of Windows 10 Version 1703, SetProcessDpiAwarenessContext used above is the replacement for SetProcessDpiAwareness, which in turn was a replacement for SetProcessDPIAware. Love the clear naming scheme.

This is the kind of thing I hate about "New Windows". Once upon a time MS used to strive for backward compatibility. These days every few years there's a new function you need to call. You can't get optimal behavior just by writing good code from the start. You need to do that, and also call the YesIKnowHowPixelsWork api call, and set <yesIAmCompetent>true</yesIAmCompetent> in your manifest to get what should be the default behavior. It's a mess.

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This is precisely the "Old Windows" way of doing things where there are legacy APIs still supported for that forever backwards compatibility and current APIs exist for ways you probably want to do things in a new app.

For reference SetProcessDPIAware solidified over 15 years ago whereas 15 years prior to that there wasn't even a taskbar so of course it's going to be out of date from a UI API perspective but that's what's needed if you want to also support apps from 15 years ago well.

Specific example from the good old days: EnableTraceEx2 "supersedes the EnableTrace and EnableTraceEx functions.". https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/evntrace/...

Func -> FuncEx -> FuncExN was a common pattern. (Which I like more than Func -> Funcness -> FuncnessContext, despite the lack of creativity!) Another one was tagging structures with their own length as the first member variable, so if a later SDK creates a newer version of the struct, the callee can tell the difference. eg https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/seccrypto/cry...

The reason it's so complex is because of backwards compatibility. Non-DPI aware applications from before DPI settings were a thing can't advertise that they're not DPI aware, so if an application doesn't announce which it is, Windows has to assume that it's not aware. A couple years ago, Microsoft was able to make changes to the GDI libraries to automatically adjust the size of elements its rendering which makes a lot of things sharper. But things like images or anything on screen not rendered by GDI will not magically become sharp.

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