Microsoft Windows 2000 offers many features and subsystems designed specifically to handle an enterprise's mission-critical data-processing needs. These features and subsystems are not available on client operating systems such as Microsoft Windows 98. Only Windows 2000 offers the Service Control Manager (SCM), performance monitoring, event logging, security, asynchronous I/O, and so on. This book describes these features, explains the motivation to use them, and gives you the information you need to best leverage them.

This book does not attempt to explain basic Windows programming and assumes that you are already quite familiar with many Windows topics such as processes, threads, thread synchronization, DLLs, Unicode, structured exception handling, and memory management. If you need a refresher on any of these topics, I encourage you to consult Programming Applications for Microsoft Windows, Fourth Edition (Jeffrey Richter, Microsoft Press, 1999). The sample source code in the book you are reading requires you to be well acquainted with the C++ programming language.

Throughout this book, emphasis is placed on writing high-performance and robust services that are expected to stay running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Also, Microsoft is hard at work developing 64-bit Windows 2000. It is expected that many companies will eventually use 64-bit Windows to host their services since this system will offer greater performance and scalability. At the time of this writing, a 64-bit version of Windows has not been released. However, 64-bit Windows has been considered while developing all the source code in this book. The sample applications will build and run with little or no modification on 64-bit Windows once Microsoft makes it available.