The Old New Thing

October 2003 - Page 2 of 4 - The Old New Thing

Using the TAB key to navigate in non-dialogs

October 21, 2003 Oct 21, 2003 10/21/03
Raymond Chen
The IsDialogMessage function works even if you aren't a dialog. As long as your child windows have the WS_TABSTOP and/or WS_GROUP styles, they can be navigated as if they were part of a dialog box. One caveat is that IsDialogMessage will send DM_GETDEFID and DM_SETDEFID messages to your window, which are ...

What is the Alt+Tab order?

October 20, 2003 Oct 20, 2003 10/20/03
Raymond Chen
What determines the order in which icons appear in the Alt+Tab list? The icons appear in the same order as the window Z-order. When you switch to a window, then it comes to the top of the Z-order. If you minimize a window, it goes to the bottom of the Z-order. The Alt+Esc hotkey (gosh, does ...

Curling anyone?

October 18, 2003 Oct 18, 2003 10/18/03
Raymond Chen
The Granite Curling Club is having their annual open house today, October 18th 2003, from 2pm to 8pm. The Seattle facility is the only dedicated curling facility in the United States west of the Rockies. Bring sweatpants, flat-soled shoes, and $5. They'll provide the brooms and duct tape. I became fascinated with curling many ...

Don't let Marketing mess with your slides

October 17, 2003 Oct 17, 2003 10/17/03
Raymond Chen
It's PDC season, so I thought I'd relate an anecdote about a conference from many years ago. I forget which conference it was, maybe GCDC 1996, we were all busy preparing our presentations and submitted them to the Microsoft conference representatives so they could apply the standard ...

Scrollbars redux: Part 12

October 16, 2003 Oct 16, 2003 10/16/03
Raymond Chen
Reader Jeff Miller added Word-style scroll tips to our sample scrollbar program. Here's how he did it: A tracking tooltip is used to display the scroll tip because we don't want the tooltip to do automatic positioning or automatic show/hide. When a tracking scroll occurs...

The much-misunderstood "nop" action

October 16, 2003 Oct 16, 2003 10/16/03
Raymond Chen
Last month, the printers were reconfigured in our building and we got an announcement that went like this: Subject: Printer/Copier Reconfiguration Microsoft Digital Campus Program Action Required blah blah blah printers are being reconfigured blah blah blah...