May 31, 2010May 31, 201005/31/10The great thing about the taskbar is that everybody and their pet dog have an idea for how it can be improved.
The bad thing about the taskbar is that everybody and their pet dog have an idea for how it can be improved.
May 28, 2010May 28, 201005/28/10One of my colleagues tipped me off to some additional resources on the subject of using the DropTarget technique for accepting files for execution.
First, it turns out that there is an SDK sample that demonstrates the DropTarget technique after all.
May 28, 2010May 28, 201005/28/10I mentioned last time that there’s an optimization in the treatment of the system menu which significantly reduces the number of menus in the system.
When a window has the WS_SYSMENU window style, it has a system menu, but until somebody calls GetSystemMenu on that window,
May 27, 2010May 27, 201005/27/10Our old friend Norman Diamond wonders
when you are supposed to destroy a menu and when you are
supposed to let Windows destroy it.
The rules for when the window manager implicitly destroys
menus are actually not that complicated.
If a window is destroyed,
May 26, 2010May 26, 201005/26/10A customer had the following question:
I’m looking for a way to get the height of text which consists
entirely of digits, for example “123”,
as these characters do not have any descent or internal leading.
I expected functions like
GetTextExtent
to return the character’s ascent minus the internal leading,
May 25, 2010May 25, 201005/25/10Cliff Mass is Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington. To those of us in the Seattle area, he’s a weather celebrity, appearing every Friday on local public radio station KUOW to provide a weekend weather forecast and discuss other weather issues.
May 25, 2010May 25, 201005/25/10When you copy multiple files in Windows Vista, the progress dialog gives you an estimate of the time remaining as well as an indication of what fraction of the operation has been completed. But one thing it doesn’t tell you is the name of the file currently being copied.
May 24, 2010May 24, 201005/24/10The blog server folks tell me that the upgrade is complete. Thanks for your patience. I’m told they will throw the switch early this afternoon.
The new URL for this site after the switchover will be http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/, although there should be 301 redirects at all the old URLs so your existing links will still work.
May 24, 2010May 24, 201005/24/10Via the suggestion box, Matthew Douglass-Riley wonders about the history and fate of the What’s This? button. (The same question was repeated by an anonymous coward.)
The What’s This? button (more formally known as the contextual help caption button) is turned on by the WS_EX_CONTEXTHELP extended style and takes the form of a question mark.
May 21, 2010May 21, 201005/21/10The SHAutoComplete function lets you attach
autocomplete functionality to an edit control,
and there are flags that describe what sources you want
the autocomplete to draw from.
If you call SHAutoComplete a second time,
the second set of flags replace the original flags.
