Showing archive results for 2013

We saw over a decade ago (my goodness I've been doing this way too long) that the and functions do not take menu wrapping into account because they don't take a window handle parameter, so they don't know what menu to test for wrapping. Still, they are useful functions if you aren't worried about menu wrapping because they let you do window siz...

Say you launch a program, and for whatever reason the program takes a long time to start up, so you start doing something else, say launching Calculator and balancing your checkbook. Eventually, the program you launched a while back gets itself off the ground and creates its main window. And the window sits in the background (since the window manag...

There are a number of tricks people try to pull, and I hate them. Today's trick is one of the many varieties of the BCC trick (sometimes less surreptitiously—but still annoyingly—done as a CC trick). Occasionally, I will be quietly added to an email discussion, typically via BCC, without any indication as to why I was added. After rea...

I dreamed that my brother complained, "Dude, you didn't leave room for my car in the garage." Well yeah, because I didn't know you were coming. We decide to go out for dinner, and I see that he squeezed a third car into our two-car garage. We back out, and I watch the car fit through a gap of two feet between my car and the garage door. We drive a...

IFolderFilter.

In our discussion , we saw that you can declare a pure virtual function with the syntax, and if you try to call one of these functions from the base class, you will get the dreaded R6025 - pure virtual function call error. In that article, I wrote that a pure virtual function is "a method which is declared by the base class, but for which no i...

Professor Hubert Alyea would be 110 years old today, if he were still among us. (He passed away in 1996 at the ripe age of 93.) LIFE magazine called him the science teacher you wish you had for his engaging (and often explosive) chemistry demonstrations. He was called an "international grand master of lecture demonstrations" by Bassam Shakhashir...

We saw some time ago how the window manager decides where to place a newly-created window if you pass the values when creating the window. But what if you want to filter the values first? If you pass an explicit upper left corner but pass for the width and height, then the bottom right corner will be down near the bottom right corner of the scre...

You want to use the TAB key to navigate through a non-dialog, so you call in your message loop, but it doesn't work! The problem here is that you are passing the wrong window handle to . The first parameter to is the dialog-like window you want to be able to navigate through. But the code above passes the window that received the message, so...

As I wrote today's story, I recalled that I wrote the bulk of my thesis on an airplane. In longhand. Microsoft flew me out for an interview, so I had to endure two cross-country plane trips. I scheduled the interview on a Monday so that I would miss only one day of class, and among the things I brought with me was a notepad, which started the tri...