The Old New Thing

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

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

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?

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

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

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 ...

How can I tell that I have a shell folder that represents My Computer?

You have in your hands an , and you want to know whether this is an that represents My Computer. There are a few ideas that may occur to you. One is to ask the folder for its current location and compare it to . Okay, we have a lot of moving parts here. Let's look at them one at a time. The function takes an object and asks what folder...

Raymond's subjective, biased, unfair, and completely wrong characterization of the sounds of several East Asian (and one Southeast Asian) languages

Hokkien: This is the language I learned first, so to me it sounds perfectly normal and is in fact how languages should sound. I find it odd that people describe it as one of the more difficult languages to learn. I mean, sure it has a large tone repertoire (eight theoretical, though only seven in practice) and extensive tone sandhi, but that's...