For GDAL v2.1 the source code of the utilities are moved to the core of GDAL: https://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/rfc59.1_utilities_as_a_library
MapWinGIS has implemented several GDAL Utilities, like gdalwarp and gdaltranslate by copying their code. This is no longer needed and MapWinGIS should move to the library version of the utilities.
Luckily the GDAL Team made unit tests for each utility and method. Those tests can be used to see the recommended use of those methods.
Here are the ones for the utilities: https://svn.osgeo.org/gdal/trunk/autotest/utilities/
I didn't find gdal_utils.h file in Tamas's package. However after copying it manually from the latest GDAL source it can be compiled against latest libs, so perhaps it's simply one file not included. I'll wait until update of Tamas's package before changing our methods.
Here is some reference of the new functions: http://www.gdal.org/gdal__utils_8h.html#a6ed3c9681cabcfcbd6fc87d427762482.
I've created an issue about this at Tamas' issue tracker: https://github.com/gisinternals/buildsystem/issues/86
The file 'gdal_utils.h' is now available in the packages from Tamas.
We can now work on implementing it. I'll create sub-tasks for each tool.