April 29, 2005Apr 29, 200504/29/05We’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.
April 28, 2005Apr 28, 200504/28/05As we have seen recently, thread messages are eaten by modal loops
because they have nowhere to go when dispatched.
However, there is a way to see them before they vanish,
provided the modal loop is cooperative.
The WH_MSGFILTER message hook allows you to receive messages
passed to
the CallMsgFilter function.
April 27, 2005Apr 27, 200504/27/05We saw last time that thread messages are eaten by modal loops.
Today we’ll illustrate, and then we’ll try to fix it next time.
Start with our scratch program and make the following changes:
#include <shellapi.h>
BOOL IsThreadMessage(MSG *pmsg)
{
if (pmsg->hwnd == NULL) {
switch (pmsg->message) {
case WM_APP: MessageBeep(-1);
April 26, 2005Apr 26, 200504/26/05Oceanographer 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,
April 26, 2005Apr 26, 200504/26/05Thread 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.
April 25, 2005Apr 25, 200504/25/05The 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,
April 25, 2005Apr 25, 200504/25/05The 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.
April 22, 2005Apr 22, 200504/22/05I 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>
April 21, 2005Apr 21, 200504/21/05Swedish 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.
April 21, 2005Apr 21, 200504/21/05Last 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.
