The Old New Thing

April 2005 - The Old New Thing

Building a dialog template at run-time

April 29, 2005 Apr 29, 2005 04/29/05
Raymond Chen
We've spent quite a bit of time over the past year learning about dialog templates and the dialog manager. Now we're going to put the pieces together to do something interesting: Building a dialog template on the fly. What we're going to write is an extremely lame version of the MessageBox function. Why bother writing a bad version of ...
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If you pull a 1920's fire extinguisher out of the ocean, for pete's sake don't drink it!

April 26, 2005 Apr 26, 2005 04/26/05
Raymond Chen
Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer is a fascinating source of information. He appeared again on my local public radio station to discuss issues related to garbage floating in the ocean. For example, at the 5:05 mark, he reminds us that, if you pull a 1920's fire extinguisher out of the ocean, you shouldn't drink it. Other fascinating facts: ...

Thread messages are eaten by modal loops

April 26, 2005 Apr 26, 2005 04/26/05
Raymond Chen
Thread messages (as generated by the PostThreadMessage function) do not go anywhere when passed to the DispatchMessage function. This is obvious if you think about it, because there is no window handle associated with a thread message. DispatchMessage has no idea what to do with a message with no associated window. It has no choice but to ...
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Welcome to Millennium Tower, due for completion in May 2005

April 25, 2005 Apr 25, 2005 04/25/05
Raymond Chen
The friend who brought to my attention the guide to British pub etiquette reports that Portsmouth's Millennium Tower, centerpiece of the Millennium Project, is still not finished, due for completion (scroll to the end of the article) in May 2005. To disguise the embarrassment, they've renamed it to Spinnaker Tower, thereby—as the ...

What is the HINSTANCE passed to SetWindowsHookEx used for?

April 25, 2005 Apr 25, 2005 04/25/05
Raymond Chen
The SetWindowsHookEx function accepts a HINSTANCE parameter. The documentation explains that it is a handle to the DLL containing the hook procedure. Why does the window manager need to have this handle? It needs the handle so it knows which DLL to load into each process when the hook fires. It injects the DLL you pass, then calls the ...
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The new scratch program

April 22, 2005 Apr 22, 2005 04/22/05
Raymond Chen
I think it's time to update the scratch program we've been using for the past year. I hear there's this new language called C++ that's going to become really popular any day now, so let's hop on the bandwagon! #define STRICT #define UNICODE #define _UNICODE #include <windows.h> #include <windowsx.h> #include <ole2.h> #...
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Sweden's Worst Driver

April 21, 2005 Apr 21, 2005 04/21/05
Raymond Chen
Swedish Television announced a new reality-based television program called Sweden's Worst Driver (Sveriges värsta bilförare). I've done a bad job of translating some excerpts: TV4 has gathered seven of Sweden's worst drivers and subjects them to a series of tests and challenges. Those who complete each exercise the best get a prize...

The Itanium’s so-called stack

April 21, 2005 Apr 21, 2005 04/21/05
Raymond Chen
Last year I alluded to the fact that the Itanium processor has two stacks. The one that is traditionally thought of as "the stack" (and the one that the sp register refers to) is a manually managed block of memory from which a function can carve out space to use during its execution. For example, if you declare a local variable like TCHAR ...
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