The Old New Thing

January 2014 - Page 2 of 3 - The Old New Thing

Commissioner Bud Selig was named the first recipient of the Commissioner Bud Selig Leadership Award

January 22, 2014 Jan 22, 2014 01/22/14
Raymond Chen
In what was sure to have been a stunning surprise, last night, the first annual Commissioner Bud Selig Leadership Award was given out. And the winner was... Allan H. "Bud" Selig! I wonder who will win next year. Or who will win the Bud Selig Lifetime Achievement Award. Perhaps just to save time, they will name Bud Selig the Bud Selig ...

What clock do MSG.time and GetMessageTime use?

January 22, 2014 Jan 22, 2014 01/22/14
Raymond Chen
The structure has a field called which is a . There is also a function which returns a . Both are documented as returning the time the message was generated, but the types are different. Are these time units comparable? Yes, they are the same thing. They all use the 32-bit timer provided by the function. Sorry about the inconsistency in...

When the Web page says that a tool is not supported, it means that if you find a problem and contact technical support, they're just going to point you back to the Web page

January 21, 2014 Jan 21, 2014 01/21/14
Raymond Chen
I file this under the category of People refuse to read what is right in front of them. There used to be a number of utilities available for download which all go by the name PowerToys. And they all contain text like this: Note: We take great care to ensure that PowerToys work as they should, but they are not part of XYZ and are not ...

How do I get a high resolution icon for a file?

January 20, 2014 Jan 20, 2014 01/20/14
Raymond Chen
Today's Little Program obtains a high resolution icon for a file. Start with our scratch program and make these changes. Remember, Little Programs do little or no error checking. This week's smart pointer class is (rolls dice) ! The function does nothing new. It simply retrieves the system image list icon index for a file's icon. The...

Psychic debugging: Why messages aren't getting processed by your message pump

January 17, 2014 Jan 17, 2014 01/17/14
Raymond Chen
The second parameter to the is an optional window handle that is used to tell the function to retrieve only messages that belong to the specified window. A filtered is nearly always a bad idea, because your program will not respond to messages that don't meet the filter. Unlike a filtered (which simply returns "no messages satisfy the ...

There are so many things that call themselves message queues

January 15, 2014 Jan 15, 2014 01/15/14
Raymond Chen
There are a whole bunch of things in Windows that call themselves message queues, and none of them have anything to do with each other. There is the window manager message queue, which holds window messages. And there is the Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ) which is a networking technology for allowing multiple computers to communicate with ...