Showing archive results for July 2008

At last we reach the 32-bit extended menu template. Introduced in Windows 95, this remains the most advanced menu template format through Windows Vista. As you might expect, the 32-bit extended menu template is just a 32-bit version of the 16-bit extended menu template, so if you've been following along, you should find no real surprise...

Windows 95 introduced a new menu format, known as "extended menus". You declare these in a resource file with the MENUEX keyword. The 16-bit extended menu is really just a temporary stopping point on the way to the 32-bit extended menu, since the 16-bit form is supported only by the Windows 95 family of operating systems. It's sort of th...

Elissa Ely runs into a bureaucratic wall trying to pay her invalid mother's credit card bill. They won't tell her the outstanding balance on her mother's account because "it seemed to run the risk that a stranger might pay someone else's bill." My own mother ran into a similar problem. She wanted to find out the balance in an old elementary scho...

8 wonders why the "Install Font" dialog looks so old-school. (And Kevin Provance demonstrates poor reading skills by not only ignoring the paragraph that explains why the suggestion box is closed, but also asking a question that's a dup of one already in the suggestion box!) Because it's a really old dialog. That dialog has been around for ...

At the lunch table some time ago, we considered the possibility of riding the STP atop a classic ice cream bicycle. You could play the music and cruise down the road, selling ice cream sandwiches out of your trunk. Naturally, you'd start really early in the day, because you can't go very fast on that bicycle, and besides, nobody is going to wa...

Now that we've got a handle on 16-bit classic menu templates, we can move on to the next evolutionary step, namely 32-bit classic menu templates. The 32-bit classic menu template is in fact nearly identical to the 16-bit classic menu template. The only change is that the menu text is now a Unicode string instead of an ANSI string. Consequently,...

Steve Tripoli looks at deception in the car sales industry.

We saw last time that you can specify a separator in a menu item template by specifying zero for everything, even though technically you're supposed to pass MFT_SEPARATOR for the flags. What's the deal with that alternate form for menu item template separators? This goes back to the early days of the InsertMenu function (and its friends like Ap...

In a Lisbon grocery store, I was looking at the ingredient panel of a box of cereal. It contained the information in multiple languages, and French came first. I was momentarily stunned by the following warning: Traces possibles d'arachides. I guess this falls in the category of "Raymond misreads French cereal box warnings."

Menus aren't as complicated as dialogs. There are no fonts, no positioning, it's just a list of menu items and flags. Well, okay, there's the recursive part, when a menu has a submenu. But that's really the only wrinkle. Most of it is pretty boring. The 16-bit classic menu template begins with the following header: struct MENUHEADER16 { WORD ...