Showing results for April 2005 - The Old New Thing

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 function. Why bother writing a bad version of something that Wind...

The WH_MSGFILTER hook lets you snoop on messages as they travel through modal loops.

A sample program that loses thread messages.

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 (as generated by the function) do not go anywhere when passed to the function. This is obvious if you think about it, because there is no window handle associated with a thread message. has no idea what to do with a message with no associated window. It has no choice but to throw the message away. This has dire consequences ...

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 Hampshir...

The function accepts a 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 function you pass. Clearly the fu...

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! The basic idea of this program is the same as our old scratch program, but now it has that fresh lemony C++ scent. Instead of keeping ou...

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 and ...

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 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 then that buf...