Why highlighting by inverting colors is a bad idea

October 31, 2003 Oct 31, 2003 10/31/03

Raymond C

Often people will say, "Oh, we can highlight by inverting the color." This may have worked great on two-color black-and-white displays, but in the world of 32-bit color this no longer is effective. Consider the following picture. See if you can guess which one is inverted...

Drawing an active-looking caption even when not active

October 29, 2003 Oct 29, 2003 10/29/03

Raymond C

"Why would somebody ever want to do that?" you might ask. Well, this is a common appearance for floating toolbars. (But aside from that case, I can't think of any other valid reason to draw a window as active even though it isn't.) Fortunately this is easy to do. Just add this line to the WndProc...

Getting a custom right-click menu for the caption icon

October 27, 2003 Oct 27, 2003 10/27/03

Raymond C

Explorer does it. Now you can too. It's a simple matter of detecting a context menu on the caption icon and displaying a custom context menu. Here are the simple changes to our scratch program to display a rather pointless one-item menu. When we receive a WM_CONTEXTMENU ...

Writing a sort comparison function

October 23, 2003 Oct 23, 2003 10/23/03

Raymond C

When you are writing a sort comparison function (say, to be passed to ListView_SortItems or *gasp* to be used as an IComparer), your comparison function needs to follow these rules: Reflexivity: Compare(a, a) = 0. Anti-Symmetry: Compare(a, b) has the opposite sign of Compare(b, a), where 0 is considered to be its own opposite. Transitivity...