The Old New Thing

When the normal window destruction messages are thrown for a loop

July 27, 2005 Jul 27, 2005 07/27/05

Raymond Chen

Last time, I alluded to weirdness that can result in the normal cycle of destruction messages being thrown out of kilter. Commenter Adrian noted that the WM_GETMINMAXINFO message arrives before WM_NCCREATE for top-level windows. This is indeed unfortunate but (mistake or not) it's been that way for over a decade and changing it now would ...

What is the difference between WM_DESTROY and WM_NCDESTROY?

July 26, 2005 Jul 26, 2005 07/26/05

Raymond Chen

There are two window messages closely-associated with window destruction, the WM_DESTROY message and the WM_NCDESTROY message. What's the difference? The difference is that the WM_DESTROY message is sent at the start of the window destruction sequence, whereas the WM_NCDESTROY message is sent at the end. This is an important distinction ...

The importance of passing the WT_EXECUTELONGFUNCTION flag to QueueUserWorkItem

July 22, 2005 Jul 22, 2005 07/22/05

Raymond Chen

One of the flags to the QueueUserWorkItem function is WT_EXECUTELONGFUNCTION. The documentation for that flag reads The callback function can perform a long wait. This flag helps the system to decide if it should create a new thread. As noted in the documentation, the thread pool uses this flag to decide whether it should create a new ...

FindFirstFile is not a SQL query

July 21, 2005 Jul 21, 2005 07/21/05

Raymond Chen

The FindFirstFile function is not a SQL query. It's a very simple directory enumerator. There is a slightly fancier version called FindFirstFileEx, but even that function doesn't add much at present beyond filtering for directories or devices. You don't get to pass it sort criteria like or "return the files/directories sorted smallest file...