warning C4996: 'GetVersionExW': was declared deprecated

Question

I am working on VS 2013 in Win 8.1. How to solve this warning?

Answer 1

While GetVersionEx was declared deprecated, if you toss in a proper compatibility manifest declaring compatibility with Windows 8.1 and Windows 10, GetVersionEx will return the correct version number. I use GetVersionEx to detect Windows 8 or greater, and because Windows 8 is the last version of Windows to not require a manifest to return the proper Windows version, my code works fine regardless of whether the API returns Windows 6.2, 6.3, 6.4 (for early Windows 10 previews), or 10.0.

With all that said, Microsoft deprecated this API in part due to bad usage of it. Take for instance this attempt to detect Windows XP or greater:

BOOL IsXPOrGreater;
OSVERSIONINFO osver;
osver.dwOSVersionInfoSize = sizeof(OSVERSIONINFO);
GetVersionEx(&osver);
if((osver.dwMajorVersion >= 5) && (osver.dwMinorVersion >=1) IsXPOrGreater = TRUE;
else IsXPOrGreater = FALSE;

This sample would return TRUE on Windows XP, Server 2003, 7, 8, and 8.1 but would return FALSE on Windows Vista or 10. Adding one line would fix this:

BOOL IsXPOrGreater;
OSVERSIONINFO osver;
osver.dwOSVersionInfoSize = sizeof(OSVERSIONINFO);
GetVersionEx(&osver);
if((osver.dwMajorVersion >= 5) && (osver.dwMinorVersion >=1) IsXPOrGreater = TRUE;
else if(osver.dwMajorVersion >= 6) IsXPOrGreater = TRUE;
else IsXPOrGreater = FALSE;

This sample would function correctly because it knows that if the major version is 6 or greater than it is greater than XP.