Showing results for April 2005 - The Old New Thing

Apr 29, 2005
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Building a dialog template at run-time

Raymond Chen
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 function. Why bother writing a bad version of something that ...

Code
Apr 26, 2005
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If you pull a 1920's fire extinguisher out of the ocean, for pete's sake don't drink it!

Raymond Chen
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...

Non-Computer
Apr 26, 2005
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Thread messages are eaten by modal loops

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

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 ...

Code
Apr 25, 2005
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Welcome to Millennium Tower, due for completion in May 2005

Raymond Chen
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 ...

Non-Computer
Apr 25, 2005
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What is the HINSTANCE passed to SetWindowsHookEx used for?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

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 ...

Code
Apr 22, 2005
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The new scratch program

Raymond Chen
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! 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 ...

Code
Apr 21, 2005
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Sweden's Worst Driver

Raymond Chen
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 and ...

Non-Computer
Apr 21, 2005
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The Itanium’s so-called stack

Raymond Chen
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 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 ...

Code