The Old New Thing

The dialog manager, part 6: Subtleties in message loops

Last time, I left you with a homework exercise: Find the subtle bug in the interaction between and the modal message loop. The subtlety is that sets some flags but does nothing to force the message loop to notice that the flag was actually set. Recall that the function does not return until a posted message arrives in the queue. If ...

The dialog manager, part 5: Converting a non-modal dialog box to modal

Let's apply what we learned from last time and convert a modeless dialog box into a modal one. As always, start with the scratch program and make the following additions: Not a very exciting program, I grant you that. It just displays a dialog box and returns a value that depends on which button you pressed. The function uses the ...

The dialog manager, part 4: The dialog loop

The dialog loop is actually quite simple. At its core, it's just If you want something fancier in your dialog loop, you can take the loop above and tinker with it. But let's start from the beginning. The work happens in DialogBoxIndirectParam. (You should already know by now how to convert all the other DialogBoxXxx functions into ...

The dialog manager, part 3: Creating the controls

This is actually a lot less work than creating the frame, believe it or not. For each control in the template, the corresponding child window is created. The control's sizes and position is specified in the template in DLUs, so of course they need to be converted to pixels. The class name and caption also come from the template. There ...

The dialog manager, part 2: Creating the frame window

The dialog template describes what the dialog box should look like, so the dialog manager walks the template and follows the instructions therein. It's pretty straightforward; there isn't much room for decision-making. You just do what the template says. For simplicity, I'm going to assume that the dialog template is an extended dialog ...

The dialog manager, part 1: Warm-ups

I think a lot of confusion about the dialog manager stems from not really understanding how it works. It's really not that bad. I'll start by describing how dialog boxes are created over the next few articles, then move on to the dialog message loop, and wrap up with some topics regarding navigation. There will be nine parts in all. The ...

When a program asks you a question and then gets upset if you answer it

JeffDav's story of a program that didn't like it when he told it where to install reminded me of another program that we dealt with during Windows 95 development. This was a big-name program developed by one of the biggest-of-the-big name software companies. Let's give this program the imaginary name "LitWare". Its setup program asked ...

The CEO-to-English Phrase Book, a continuing series from Slate

I'm an economics geek, so of course I'm a fan of Slate's Moneybox column as well as The Dismal Science and most of all, Steven Landsburg's gleefully provocative Everyday Economics. I'm also a language geek, so I've been quite enjoying the occasional Moneybox articles which decode CEO speak into plain English titled The CEO-English Phrase ...