Universal location to write a file to, under any version of Windows in any language

Question

Having to deploy a VBA application on several computers under Windows XP, I needed to automatically create a particular file in an universal place, independent of hard drives, directory structure, even the OS language: the root directory of the C drive, namely C:\

This worked fine ... until these computers started to migrate to Vista or Windows 7, which I discovered don't easily allow writing on the C drive. What could be an alternate universal writable location that would work under any version of Windows, in any language, for all users?

Answer 1

Call a Windows API that returns the path to a SpecialFolder on the respective machine and use that - well suited are for example

• CSIDL_COMMON_DOCUMENTS (non-user-specific)
• CSIDL_COMMON_APPDATA (non-user-specific)
• CSIDL_APPDATA (user-/app-specific)
• CSIDL_MY_DOCUMENTS (user-specific)

The Windows API takes care of all that you described - locations above are writeable, work for all Windows versions and not language-dependent.

For VBA source code and samples see http://www.cpearson.com/excel/SpecialFolders.aspx

For MSDN references see:

• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/252652/en-us
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb762181%28v=vs.85%29.aspx