The Old New Thing

January 2007 - Page 4 of 4 - The Old New Thing

What('s) a character!

January 5, 2007 Jan 5, 2007 01/5/07
Raymond Chen
Norman Diamond seems to have made a side career of harping on this topic on a fairly regular basis, although he never comes out and says that this is what he's complaining about. He just assumes everybody knows. (This usually leads to confusion, as you can see from the follow-ups.) Back in the ANSI days, terminology was simpler. Windows ...

Wait, but why can I GetProcAddress for IsDialogMessage?

January 3, 2007 Jan 3, 2007 01/3/07
Raymond Chen
Okay, so I explained that a lot of so-called functions are really redirecting macros, function-like macros, intrinsic functions, and inline functions, and consequently, won't actually get anything since the function doesn't exist in the form of an exported function. But why, then, can you for ? Let's take a closer look at the exports ...

Why can't I GetProcAddress for CreateWindow?

January 2, 2007 Jan 2, 2007 01/2/07
Raymond Chen
Occasionally, I'll see people having trouble trying to for functions like or . Usually, it's coming from people who are trying to write p/invoke signatures, for p/invoke does a under the covers. Why can't you for these functions? Because they're not really functions. They're function-like macros: In fact, as you can see above is ...

The family technical support department: Everything is Outlook

January 1, 2007 Jan 1, 2007 01/1/07
Raymond Chen
We're all in the same position. Since we work with computers all day, everybody in the extended family considers us the technical support department. One thing you all need to take away from your role as family technical support department is that normal people view computers completely differently from the way you and I do. One of my ...