Raymond Chen explains it here: TEXT vs. _TEXT vs. _T, and UNICODE vs. _UNICODE:
The plain versions without the underscore affect the character set the Windows header files treat as default. So if you define
UNICODE, thenGetWindowTextwill map toGetWindowTextWinstead ofGetWindowTextA, for example. Similarly, theTEXTmacro will map toL"..."instead of"...".The versions with the underscore affect the character set the C runtime header files treat as default. So if you define
_UNICODE, then_tcslenwill map towcsleninstead ofstrlen, for example. Similarly, the_TEXTmacro will map toL"..."instead of"...".
Looking into Windows SDK you will find things like this:
#ifdef _UNICODE
#ifndef UNICODE
#define UNICODE
#endif
#endif