The Old New Thing

Scrollbars redux: Part 12

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

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...

Why is there no WM_MOUSEENTER message?

There is a message. Why isn't there a message? Because you can easily figure that out for yourself. When you receive a message, set a flag that says, "The mouse is outside the window." When you receive a message and the flag is set, then the mouse has entered the window. (...

Why doesn't the clock in the taskbar display seconds?

Early beta versions of the taskbar clock did display seconds, and it even blinked the colon like some clocks do. But we had to remove it. Why? Because that blinking colon and the constantly-updating time were killing our benchmark numbers. On machines with ...

Other uses for bitmap brushes

Bitmap brushes used to be these little 8x8 monochrome patterns that you could use for hatching and maybe little houndstooth patterns if you were really crazy. But you can do better. CreatePatternBrush lets you pass in any old bitmap - even a huge one, and it will create a brush from it. ...