It is saying there is not such member 'GetObjectW' for ObjectGroup when CLEARLY the only method being called is 'GetObject'

What.

Nope.

Lemme get back to my work computer and throw the source up here for you to browse.

Did some research. Turns out the library I was using includes windows and it DOES in fact have a method named GetObject.

Using the quickfix before usage made it work. Thanks a bunch.

But WHY does Win32 DO that?? That's so messed up!

Did some research. Turns out the library I was using includes windows and it DOES in fact have a method named GetObject.

Using the quickfix before usage made it work. Thanks a bunch.

But WHY does Win32 DO that?? That's so messed up!

If you enable unicode support in your build windows.h automatically replaces a certain set of functions with their unicode equivalents and since its done using preprocessor macros they are effectivly just dumb text replacements (Which is one of the reasons why C++ macros are such an awful idea)

This problem exists for pretty much all functions in the Windows API.

They didn't consider the consequences of their decision hard enough at the time.

at the time, the dominant language was C, not C++, so function overloading wasn't an option. They could have just made everyone call the W version directly, but then people would have whined about how dumb all the API names were (like you sometimes see for the unicode C-runtime functions, e.g. wcslen). Plus Microsoft was already fighting an uphill battle to get people to accept that Unicode was a good thing rather than a waste of memory (ASCII should be good enough for anybody!) And even the people who were willing to accept Unicode didn't want to have to go through their entire program changing function names - porting to NT (from Win16) was enough work already. Plus if they did that then it wouldn't compile for 16-bit anymore and that was where the real market was.

The macros were a perfectly reasonable compromise at the time. It is unfortunate that they don't provide a way to use overloading instead of macros for C++ nowadays, but I imagine there's little real benefit and it would very likely increase compile times in addition to making the headers simply bigger.