The Old New Thing

September 2013 - The Old New Thing

Playing a sound every time the foreground window changes

September 30, 2013 Sep 30, 2013 09/30/13
Raymond Chen
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?

September 27, 2013 Sep 27, 2013 09/27/13
Raymond Chen
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

September 26, 2013 Sep 26, 2013 09/26/13
Raymond Chen
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 function will insert line breaks, but you can try...

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

September 25, 2013 Sep 25, 2013 09/25/13
Raymond Chen
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 macro. For example, the function lets you load an resource specified by integer identifier by passing the ...

Punctuation is becoming increasingly decorative and less functional

September 24, 2013 Sep 24, 2013 09/24/13
Raymond Chen
The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks calls out abuse of the quotation mark. For some reason, quotation marks are being increasingly used as a form of emphasis (a usage which remains controversial), by people unaware that such use, when interpreted as scare quotes, serves to undermine their original point. Mind you, the emphasis ...

Providing a custom autocomplete source for an edit control

September 23, 2013 Sep 23, 2013 09/23/13
Raymond Chen
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 ...