Occasionally, I’ll see people having trouble trying to GetProcAddress for functions like CreateWindow or ExitWindows. Usually, it’s coming from people who are trying to write p/invoke signatures, for p/invoke does a GetProcAddress under the covers. Why can’t you GetProcAddress for these functions?

Because they’re not really functions. They’re function-like macros:

#define CreateWindowA(lpClassName, lpWindowName, dwStyle, x, y,\
nWidth, nHeight, hWndParent, hMenu, hInstance, lpParam)\
CreateWindowExA(0L, lpClassName, lpWindowName, dwStyle, x, y,\
nWidth, nHeight, hWndParent, hMenu, hInstance, lpParam)
#define CreateWindowW(lpClassName, lpWindowName, dwStyle, x, y,\
nWidth, nHeight, hWndParent, hMenu, hInstance, lpParam)\
CreateWindowExW(0L, lpClassName, lpWindowName, dwStyle, x, y,\
nWidth, nHeight, hWndParent, hMenu, hInstance, lpParam)
#ifdef UNICODE
#define CreateWindow  CreateWindowW
#else
#define CreateWindow  CreateWindowA
#endif // !UNICODE
#define ExitWindows(dwReserved, Code) ExitWindowsEx(EWX_LOGOFF, 0xFFFFFFFF)

In fact, as you can see above CreateWindow is doubly a macro. First, it’s a redirecting macro that expands to either CreateWindowA or CreateWindowW, depending on whether or not you are compiling UNICODE. Those are in turn function-like macros that call the real function CreateWindowExA or CreateWindowExW. All this is handled by the compiler if you include the winuser.h header file, but if for some reason you want to GetProcAddress for a function-like macro like CreateWindow, you’ll have to manually expand the macro to see what the real function is and pass that function name to GetProcAddress.

Similar remarks apply to inline functions. These functions can’t be obtained via GetProcAddress because they aren’t exported at all; they are provided to you as source code in the header file.

Note that whether something is a true function or a function-like macro (or an inline function) can depend on your target platform. For example, GetWindowLongPtrA is a true exported function on 64-bit Windows, but on 32-bit Windows, it’s just a macro that resolves to GetWindowLongA. As another example, the Interlocked family of functions are exported functions on the x86 version of Windows but are inlined functions on all other Windows architectures.

How can you figure all this out? Read the header files. That’ll show you whether the function you want is a redirecting macro, a function-like macro, an inline function, an intrinsic function, or a proper exported function. If you can’t figure it out from the header files, you can always just write a program that calls the function you’re interested in and then look at the disassembly to see what actually got generated.