ESENT distribution rights

I was wondering about the distribution rights of esent.dll (Extensible Storage Engine).

I know that it's included in Windows but, depending on the version of Windows, it's not the same.

For example, in Windows 2000, the initialisation is different and in Windows Vista+, there are some interesting parameters that wer开发者_运维百科e added.

So, instead of programming our software differently depending on the client OS, could we just take the latest version of esent.dll and distribute it with our software ?

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In case you would get the permission ... how would you distribute it without problems to W2K, XP and so on ...

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I doubt that you will be allowed to do that. Looking at Microsoft and its Windows OS you can see what an aweful burden legacy support can be. In a similar situation with ESENT I decided to just support Windows XP and for one part of my app only Windows Vista and newer, knowing that my customers are usually up to date. You could take a look into skipping support for at least Windows 2000. The ESENT API delivered with Windows XP is really powerful and you will hardly need the novelties of the newer versions.