Using the MNS_DRAGDROP style: Menu rearrangement

Raymond ChenDecember 30, 2011Dec 30, 201112/30/11

In order to do drag-drop rearrangement of menus, you need four things, most of which we already know how to do. Dragging an item out of a menu. Check. Dropping an item into a menu. Check. Connecting the drag with the drop. Rearranging menu items in response to the operation. Let's do step 4 first, just to mix things...

Using the MNS_DRAGDROP style: Dropping in

Raymond ChenDecember 29, 2011Dec 29, 201112/29/11

Last time, we looked at using the MNS_DRAG­DROP style for dragging items out of a menu. Today, we'll look at dropping them in. Take the program from last time and make the following additions. First, let's add a second item to the menu. Yes, I hard-coded another path. This is a demo, not production code. Anyway, it's time to hook ...

Using the MNS_DRAGDROP style: Dragging out

Raymond ChenDecember 28, 2011Dec 28, 201112/28/11

Windows 2000 introduced the MNS_DRAG­DROP menu style, which permits drag/drop operations in a menu. Nobody uses this style, probably because it's totally undiscoverable by the end-user. But I'll write a sample program anyway. Mind you, I knew nothing about the MNS_DRAG­DROP menu style until I started writing this entry. But I ...

Introducing the for-if anti-pattern

Raymond ChenDecember 27, 2011Dec 27, 201112/27/11

Over the years, I've seen a bunch of coding anti-patterns. I figured maybe I'll share a few. Today, I'll introduce what I'm calling the for-if anti-pattern, also known as "We'll sell you the whole seat, but you'll only need the edge." This is a special case of the for-case anti-pattern, where all but one of the cases is null. This can ...

How do I get the full path for the target of a shortcut file?

Raymond ChenDecember 23, 2011Dec 23, 201112/23/11

A customer was having trouble obtaining information from a shortcut file. "Here is a sample program that tries to print the target of a shortcut file, but it only gets the file name without a directory. How do I get the full path?" Recall that the WIN32_FIND_DATA structure contains only a file name in the cFile­Name member. It doesn't ...

How do I determine programmatically whether a particular language is LTR or RTL?

Raymond ChenDecember 22, 2011Dec 22, 201112/22/11

Given an LCID, how does one determine whether the language lays out left-to-right or right-to-left? One suggestion was simply to hard-code the list of known right-to-left languages, and if the language isn't on the list, then assume that it is left-to-right. This technique is clearly fragile, because Windows adds support for new languages not ...