The Old New Thing

Simulating media controller buttons like Play and Pause

Today's Little Program simulates pressing the Play/Pause button on your fancy keyboard. This might be useful if you want to write a program that converts some other input (say, gesture detection) into media controller events. One way of doing this is to take advantage of the Def­Window­Proc function, since the default behavior for ...
Comments are closed.0 0
Code

Marshaling won't get in your way if it isn't needed

I left an exercise at the end of last week's article: "Why is the RPC_X_NULL_REF_POINTER error raised only sometimes?" COM subscribes to the principle that if no marshaling is needed, then an interface pointer points directly at the object with no COM code in between. If the current thread is running in a single-threaded apartment, and it ...
Comments are closed.0 0
Code

If a process crashes while holding a mutex, why is its ownership magically transferred to another process?

A customer was observing strange mutex ownership behavior. They had two processes that used a mutex to coordinate access to some shared resource. When the first process crashed while owning the mutex, they found that the second process somehow magically gained ownership of that mutex. Specifically, when the first process crashed, the second ...
Comments are closed.0 0
Code

What is the story of the mysterious DS_RECURSE dialog style?

There are a few references to the DS_RECURSE dialog style scattered throughout MSDN, and they are all of the form "Don't use it." But if you look in your copy of winuser.h, there is no sign of DS_RECURSE anywhere. This obviously makes it trivial to avoid using it because you couldn't use it even if you wanted it, seeing as it doesn't exist. "...

Receiving a notification any time the selection changes in an Explorer window

Today's Little Program merely prints a message whenever the user changes the selection on the desktop. I chose the desktop for expediency, since it saves me the trouble of coming up with a way for the user to specify which Explorer window they want to track. Also, all I do is print a message saying "Selection changed!"; actually getting the ...
Comments are closed.0 0
Code

I marked my parameter as [optional], so why do I get an RPC error when I pass NULL?

Consider the following interface declaration in an IDL file: The idea here is that you want to be able to call the Cancel method as pFoo->Cancel(NULL) if you don't want to provide a reason. If you try this, you'll find that the call sometimes fails with error 0x800706F4, which decodes to HRESULT_FROM_WIN32(RPC_X_NULL_REF_POINTER). ...
Comments are closed.0 1
Code