October 29, 2004Oct 29, 200410/29/04The taskbar created all sorts of interesting problems, since the work area was not equal to the entire screen dimensions. (Multiple monitors created similar problems.) “Why didn’t the gui return the usable workspace as the root window (excluding the taskbar)?”
That would have made things even worse.
October 28, 2004Oct 28, 200410/28/04Before Explorer was introduced in Windows 95, the Windows desktop was a very different place.
The icons on your desktop did not represent files; rather, when you minimized a program, it turned into an icon on the desktop. To open a minimized program,
October 27, 2004Oct 27, 200410/27/04I had previously written on how you can retrieve the text under the cursor, and you may have noticed that it produces mixed results. It works great with some programs but not with others.
It depends on the program in question.
October 26, 2004Oct 26, 200410/26/04A colleague of mine nominated this code for Function of the Year.
(This is the same person who was the
first to report that a Windows beta used a suspect URL.)
I have to admit that this code is pretty impressive.
October 25, 2004Oct 25, 200410/25/04If you’re writing a static library, you may have need to access
the HINSTANCE of the module that you have been
linked into.
You could require that the module that links you in pass the
HINSTANCE to a special initialization function,
October 25, 2004Oct 25, 200410/25/04If the Euro 2004 tournament were a video game, it might have looked like this. View recreations of the tournament highlights, and since the graphics are computer-generated, you can select among multiple camera angles, embody a specific player, or see what it’s like to be the ball itself!
October 22, 2004Oct 22, 200410/22/04Windows 95 Setup would notice that a file it was installing was older than the file already on the machine and would ask you whether you wanted to keep the existing (newer) file or to overwrite it with the older version.
Asking the user this question at all turned out to have been a bad idea.
October 21, 2004Oct 21, 200410/21/04Windows Management Instrumentation
is a scriptable interface to configuration information.
This saves you the trouble of having to figure it out yourself.
For example, here’s a little program that enumerates all the CPUs
in your system and prints some basic information about them.
October 20, 2004Oct 20, 200410/20/04When you register your program with a file association, the shell needs to decide whether your program supports long file names so it can decide whether to pass you the long name (which may contains spaces! so make sure you put quotation marks around the “%1”
October 19, 2004Oct 19, 200410/19/04The Listview control when placed in report mode has a child header control which it uses to display column header titles. This header control is the property of the listview, but the listview is kind enough to let you retrieve the handle to that header control.
