The Old New Thing

June 2007 - The Old New Thing

Don't forget to pass the current directory along with the command line to your single-instance program

June 29, 2007 Jun 29, 2007 06/29/07
Raymond Chen
If you make a single-instance program, and somebody runs a second copy of the program and passes a command line, the most common way of handling this is to hand the command line to the first copy of the program and let the first copy deal with it. When you do this, don't forget about the current directory. If somebody passes a relative path...
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If it's optional, then don't make it mandatory

June 28, 2007 Jun 28, 2007 06/28/07
Raymond Chen
I was filling out an online form, and it gave me the option of providing feedback on the service I had received. The button was marked "optional", but I clicked it anyway because there were one or two things I thought were worthy of mentioning, suggestions on how they could improve the user's experience with the Web site, that sort of thing. ...

Those who do not understand the dialog manager are doomed to reimplement it, badly

June 27, 2007 Jun 27, 2007 06/27/07
Raymond Chen
A customer wanted to alter the behavior of a multi-line edit control so that it did not treat a press of the Tab key as a request to insert a tab character but rather treated it as a normal dialog navigation key. The approach the customer took was to subclass the edit control and intercept the Tab key: There are many things wrong with this...
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Why do DLGC_WANTALLKEYS and DLGC_WANTMESSAGE have the same value?

June 26, 2007 Jun 26, 2007 06/26/07
Raymond Chen
From a purely theoretical point of view, there is only one "want" code you really need: DLGC_WANTMESSAGE. All the others are just conveniences. For example, returning DLGC_WANTARROWS means "I want this message if it is an arrow key; otherwise, I don't care." It lets you write instead of the more cumbersome (but equivalent) Similarly, ...
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There's no point improving the implementation of a bad idea

June 25, 2007 Jun 25, 2007 06/25/07
Raymond Chen
IsBadXxxPtr is a bad idea and you shouldn't call it. In the comments, many people proposed changes to the function to improve the implementation. But what's the point? IsBadXxxPtr is just a bad idea. There's no point improving the implementation of a bad idea. On the other hand, some people suggested making it clear that IsBadXxxPtr is a ...

Einstein the geographer? A hoax.

June 22, 2007 Jun 22, 2007 06/22/07
Raymond Chen
Perhaps you've seen this quote attributed to Albert Einstein: As a young man, my fondest dream was to become a geographer. However, while working in the Customs Office, I thought deeply about the matter and concluded that it was far too difficult a subject. With some reluctance, I then turned to physics as an alternative. Well, it's a fake...