Playing a sound every time the foreground window changes

Raymond ChenSeptember 30, 2013Sep 30, 201309/30/13

Today's Little Program plays a little sound every time the foreground window changes. One of my colleagues wondered if such a program was possible, "so that I stop accidentally typing the second halves of paragraphs into windows that pop up and steal focus." It's not clear whether this program will actually solve the bigger problem, but it ...

How can I determine how responsive my application is to input?

Raymond ChenSeptember 27, 2013Sep 27, 201309/27/13

A customer was adding diagnostics to their application and wanted to know if there was a way to detect that the application was being slow in processing its input. These sorts of delays manifest themselves to the end user as a sluggish application which is slow to respond to input events. They already had a watchdog timer that was reset every...

Don't forget, Unicode includes formatting characters which can be used to influence output formatting

Raymond ChenSeptember 26, 2013Sep 26, 201309/26/13

Consider this simple function: Depending on your screen resolution and font choices, this may end up displaying like this: That line break was awfully unfortunate, stranding the number 2 on a line by itself. (In publishingspeak, this is known as a orphan.) You can't control where the Message­Box function will insert line breaks, ...

How can I tell that somebody used the MAKEINTRESOURCE macro to smuggle an integer inside a pointer?

Raymond ChenSeptember 25, 2013Sep 25, 201309/25/13

Many functions and interfaces provide the option of passing either a string or an integer. The parameter is formally declared as a string, and if you want to pass an integer, you smuggle the integer inside a pointer by using the MAKE­INT­RESOURCE macro. For example, the Find­Resource function lets you load an resource specified by ...

Providing a custom autocomplete source for an edit control

Raymond ChenSeptember 23, 2013Sep 23, 201309/23/13

Today's Little Program shows a custom source for autocomplete. It's nothing exciting, but at least's it's something you can use as a starting point for your own customizations. We start with a dialog template, whose edit control will be the target of a custom autocomplete. Just for fun, I wrote the program in ATL. Instead of complaining ...