January 2007 | Page 3 of 4 | The Old New Thing

The wisdom of sev^H^H^Heighth graders: It was not just white people who were helped by Martin Luther King

Raymond ChenJanuary 15, 2007Jan 15, 200701/15/07

(Today is the birthday of the famed civil rights leader, the first time since 2001 that the federal holiday coincides with the correct historical date. It seemed an auspicious date to return to the time machine essay.) The eighth grade students were given the same in-class writing assignment as the seventh graders, with the same ground rule

Does Microsoft internally use MFC for writing Windows apps?

Raymond ChenJanuary 15, 2007Jan 15, 200701/15/07

Craig Ward figures that if he asks enough questions I might answer one of them. "Does Microsoft internally use MFC for writing Windows apps? How about VB?" People use whatever they decide best meets the requirements for the task at hand. That could be a batch file, a C++ program, a perl script, a web page with a bunch of JScript, use your ima

How do I print the contents of a rich text control?

Raymond ChenJanuary 12, 2007Jan 12, 200701/12/07

For some reason, people are really puzzled by rich edit printing. I'm no expert on printing, but even I was able to figure it out. The kernel is the EM_FORMATRANGE message. Each time you call it, a little bit more of the rich text control is printed, and the message returns the index of the first unprinted character, which you can pass back i

The history of the RichEdit control from Murray Sargent

Raymond ChenJanuary 11, 2007Jan 11, 200701/11/07

Murray Sargent is a programmer over in the Office division whose blog deals mostly with math in Office, but he also slips into RichEdit history. If you can't get enough of a history fix from this web site, you can surf on over to Murray's for another hit.

How do I put more than 32,000 characters into a rich text control?

Raymond ChenJanuary 11, 2007Jan 11, 200701/11/07

Last time we looked at loading an entire file into a rich text control. The code runs great, until you try to use it to display a license agreement provided by your legal department, and then some paranoid user reports that they can't read past page seven. (What, somebody reads those things?) What's going on? If you don't specify otherwise

Ken Levine teaches us about television script writing

Raymond ChenJanuary 10, 2007Jan 10, 200701/10/07

Ken Levine has written for some of the most well-known television programs of the past few decades. M*A*S*H, Cheers (for which he won an Emmy), Frasier. And that's not counting his second (third? fourth?) career as a baseball announcer. He writes about whatever is on his mind, be it Barry Bonds' 715th home run, what not to put into your te

How do I load an entire file into a rich text control?

Raymond ChenJanuary 10, 2007Jan 10, 200701/10/07

To load an entire file into a rich text control, you can use the EM_STREAMIN message, which accepts an IStream of data all at once. Once you find the message, it's pretty straightforward how to use it, but I'll write out the code anyway; You pretty much follow your nose. The EM_STREAMIN message wants you to tell it the format of the stream

Article of clothing or tasty dessert?

Raymond ChenJanuary 9, 2007Jan 9, 200701/9/07

Balaclava or baklava? I always get the two confused, and I have to stop and think. "Why were the bank robbers covered in a tasty dessert?" "Who wants to eat a hooded knit cap?"

What triggers the recall of an offline file?

Raymond ChenJanuary 9, 2007Jan 9, 200701/9/07

Hierarchical storage management is one of the taxes software developers have to pay. What can you safely do to an offline file? What will trigger its recall? (First, a note on terminology: Recalling a file means to restore it from remote storage to local storage. A file that has been recalled is online; a file that has been placed on remote

Why do property sheets sometimes take a first-chance exception?

Raymond ChenJanuary 8, 2007Jan 8, 200701/8/07

Reader cmonachan asked why CPropertySheet::DoModal can cause a first-chance exception. This is mentioned in Knowledge Base article 158552. But why take the exception in the first place? First off, let's take MFC out of the picture. The first-chance exception is coming from the property sheet manager. MFC is just the middle-man. Okay, so wh

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