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[Jose]

I was asked by someone to do a small app 4 windows. I read a tutorial on windows API for people already into C and it seems more or less straighforward. Now I have a small problem. GDI doesn't support PNG (or Jpeg but I prefer PNG) decoding of graphics objects and while GDI+ does it's only available by default in XP. Actually you can use it in previous Windows versions but the thing seems to be too much C++ oriented for my taste.
So I need to choose and learn another method and I was wondering what would be the best one considering it's usability in other future projects.

Cheers

[Trev]

Windows' support for JPEG is similar to its support for PNG. If you can't use GDI+, I would look at libpng <http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/libpng.html>. It's distributed under the zlib license, which has restrictions similar to the BSD and MIT licenses.

[Jose]

Amiga datatypes come to mind..

I was googling about using it in Win2k and found some previous GDI+ version(s?) had a flaw that allowed to execution of code from malicious jpeg images

Anyway, before GDI+ how did most developers support jpeg and png etc., did M$ provided some standard lib ? I find it hard to believe they only added support for that after XP :-o

Checking libpng right now...

[adolescent]

Jose wrote:

Anyway, before GDI+ how did most developers support jpeg and png etc., did M$ provided some standard lib ? I find it hard to believe they only added support for that after XP :-o

Intel has/had a good JPEG library. I used it to convert from DIB to JPEG for a project about 10 years ago. :-D (I don't think PNG existed back then even.)

[Trev]

Amiga datatypes come to mind..

Yeah, datatypes are cool. There's nothing similar in the Windows Platform SDK.

I was googling about using it in Win2k and found some previous GDI+ version(s?) had a flaw that allowed to execution of code from malicious jpeg images

As opposed to Amiga OS, which offers no protection from malicious code whatsoever? ;-) Software is inherently flawed. . . .

Anyway, before GDI+ how did most developers support jpeg and png etc., did M$ provided some standard lib ? I find it hard to believe they only added support for that after XP

By reading up on the file specs and supporting them natively? Or as adolescent said, by using a third party library. GDI was designed to put bitmap data on the screen. I don't think Microsoft much cared how you stored the data itself.