Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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The dialog manager, part 7: More subtleties in message loops

April 6th, 2005
Last time, we solved the problem with the function by posting a harmless message. Today, we're going to solve the problem in an entirely different way. The idea here is to make sure the modal message loop regains control, even if all that happened were incoming sent messages, so that it can detect that the flag is set and break out of ...

The dialog manager, part 6: Subtleties in message loops

April 5th, 2005
Last time, I left you with a homework exercise: Find the subtle bug in the interaction between and the modal message loop. The subtlety is that sets some flags but does nothing to force the message loop to notice that the flag was actually set. Recall that the function does not return until a posted message arrives in the queue. If ...

The dialog manager, part 5: Converting a non-modal dialog box to modal

April 4th, 2005
Let's apply what we learned from last time and convert a modeless dialog box into a modal one. As always, start with the scratch program and make the following additions: Not a very exciting program, I grant you that. It just displays a dialog box and returns a value that depends on which button you pressed. The function uses the ...

The dialog manager, part 4: The dialog loop

April 1st, 2005
The dialog loop is actually quite simple. At its core, it's just If you want something fancier in your dialog loop, you can take the loop above and tinker with it. But let's start from the beginning. The work happens in DialogBoxIndirectParam. (You should already know by now how to convert all the other DialogBoxXxx functions into ...

The dialog manager, part 3: Creating the controls

March 31st, 2005
This is actually a lot less work than creating the frame, believe it or not. For each control in the template, the corresponding child window is created. The control's sizes and position is specified in the template in DLUs, so of course they need to be converted to pixels. The class name and caption also come from the template. There ...

Neuroscience in the service of basketball fans

March 31st, 2005
Nick Shulz's Transition Game pointed out Slate's experiment in using neuroscience to distract opposing foul shooters. I thought this worth mentioning now that it seems that the entire country has been swept up in NCAA basketball fever...

The dialog manager, part 2: Creating the frame window

March 30th, 2005
The dialog template describes what the dialog box should look like, so the dialog manager walks the template and follows the instructions therein. It's pretty straightforward; there isn't much room for decision-making. You just do what the template says. For simplicity, I'm going to assume that the dialog template is an extended dialog ...

Adventures in product testing: Candles that catch fire

March 29th, 2005
Not to be outdone by frying pans that explode when you use them for frying, Nature's Finest Candles has issued a product recall [pdf] because the candles catch fire when you light them. This is not to be confused with birthday candles that catch fire and explode...

The dialog manager, part 1: Warm-ups

March 29th, 2005
I think a lot of confusion about the dialog manager stems from not really understanding how it works. It's really not that bad. I'll start by describing how dialog boxes are created over the next few articles, then move on to the dialog message loop, and wrap up with some topics regarding navigation. There will be nine parts in all. The ...

When a program asks you a question and then gets upset if you answer it

March 28th, 2005
JeffDav's story of a program that didn't like it when he told it where to install reminded me of another program that we dealt with during Windows 95 development. This was a big-name program developed by one of the biggest-of-the-big name software companies. Let's give this program the imaginary name "LitWare". Its setup program asked ...