Having an owner window from another process is tricky, but it's sometimes the right thing to do

March 31, 2011 Mar 31, 2011 03/31/11

Raymond Chen

A customer had a main program (let's call it A) and a helper program (let's call it B), and the customer wanted and wanted B to act like a modal dialog relative to A. When B is launched, we disable A's window and then call SetForegroundWindow(hwndB) to simulate a modal dialog. How do we make sure that focus goes to B's window and ...

How do I get the title of a dialog from a dialog resource?

March 30, 2011 Mar 30, 2011 03/30/11

Raymond Chen

A customer submitted the following question: We are developing automated tests for our application. Among other things, our application uses property sheets, which means that the name of the tab is stored as the title of the dialog template resource. Since we want our automated tests to run on all language versions of our application, we don'...

Why did Win32 define BOOL as a signed int instead of an unsigned int?

March 28, 2011 Mar 28, 2011 03/28/11

Raymond Chen

Igor Levicki wants somebody from Microsoft to explain why BOOL was defined as a signed int instead of an unsigned int. You don't need to work for Microsoft to figure this out. All the information you need is publically available. Quoting from K&R Classic, which was the operative C standards document at the time Windows was being ...

How do I monitor, or even control, the lifetime of an Explorer window?

March 25, 2011 Mar 25, 2011 03/25/11

Raymond Chen

A customer wanted help with monitoring the lifetime of an Explorer window. We want to launch a copy of Explorer to open a specific folder, then wait until the user closes the folder before continuing. We tried launching a copy of Explorer with the folder on the command line, then doing a Wait­For­Single­Object on the process ...

Function requirements are cumulative: If you fail to meet any of them, then all bets are off

March 23, 2011 Mar 23, 2011 03/23/11

Raymond Chen

A customer was having problems with the Wait­For­Multiple­Objects function: We are looking for a clarification of the behavior of Wait­For­Multiple­Objects. We have a thread that waits on two handles (call them Handle1 and Handle2) with Wait­For­Multiple­Objects, bWaitAll = FALSE. Under certain conditions...