The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
What clock do MSG.time and GetMessageTime use?
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 signed/unsigned-ness. Feel free to cast between them; they are fundamentally the same thing. Whether you prefer the signed or unsigned version depends on what you intend to do with the calculation, specifically, how you want to treat the case where the events occurred out...
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
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 supported by Microsoft. For this reason, Microsoft Technical Support is unable to answer questions about PowerToys. This sentence isn't exactly in the fine print either. It's right there at the top of the page. This nevertheless does not stop a customer from contacting their su...
Hello Kitty takes a rather inefficient trip to the United States
In the book Hello Kitty Takes a Trip, the title character travels to New York, Florida, Vermont, and Hawaii, in that order. Now, sure, the Traveling Salesman Problem is NP-hard, but you're not even trying.
How do I get a high resolution icon for a file?
Jumbo size.
Psychic debugging: Why messages aren't getting processed by your message pump
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 filter"), blocks your thread and does not return until a satisfactory message arrives. Instead, they just pile up like newspapers on your doorstep. A common mistake I encounter is using a filtered as the main message pump: I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing that t...
The curse of the leading zero
Remember octal? I don't.
There are so many things that call themselves message queues
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 each other by sending and reading messages. The Windows Mobile folks didn't want to feel left out, so they created their own Message Queue Point-to-Point message queue system. These are all unrelated technologies. Trying to, say, read window messages from a MSMQ message ...
How do I hit the Win+PrintScreen hotkey if my tablet doesn't have a PrtSc key?
Windows 8 added a new hotkey: Win+PrtSc takes a snapshot of your screen and puts it into the Screenshots folder of your Pictures library. But what if you are on a tablet with no PrtSc key? On tablets, you can perform the same operation by pressing Windows button + Volume down. Both of these are the hardware buttons on the tablet, not on any keyboard.
The Dead Grandmother/Exam Syndrome
A statistical analysis.