The Old New Thing

How to host an IContextMenu, part 6 – Displaying menu help

September 28, 2004 Sep 28, 2004 09/28/04
Raymond Chen
One of the subtleties of context menus is showing help in the status bar. Now, the program we've been developing doesn't have a status bar, so we'll fake it by putting the help text in the title bar. The key method for this task is IContextMenu::GetCommandString, which allows communication with a context menu handler about the verbs in ...

How to host an IContextMenu, part 5 – Handling menu messages

September 27, 2004 Sep 27, 2004 09/27/04
Raymond Chen
One bug that was called out immediately in our first attempt at displaying the context menu to the user is that the Open With and Send To submenus don't work. The reason for this is that these submenus are delay-generated (which explains why they don't contain anything interesting when you expand them) and owner-drawn (which you can't ...

The unrecognized assistants on those do-it-yourself shows

September 24, 2004 Sep 24, 2004 09/24/04
Raymond Chen
Some people from my knitting group have been among those assisting in the preparation of today's episode of the knitting show Knitty Gritty on The Do It Yourself Network. Stop reading if you don't want the television illusion shattered, or at least cracked a bit. Each volunteer was assigned a section of a sweater to knit. The show's host...

How to host an IContextMenu, part 4 – Key context

September 24, 2004 Sep 24, 2004 09/24/04
Raymond Chen
Another of the bugs you may have noticed in our first attempt at displaying the context menu to the user is that the Delete command doesn't alter its behavior depending on whether you hold the shift key. Recall that holding the shift key changes the behavior of the Delete command, causing it to delete a file immediately instead of moving ...

Penguins do not fall over!

September 23, 2004 Sep 23, 2004 09/23/04
Raymond Chen
Everyone has read the story about penguins falling over backwards while observing low-flying aircraft. The Annals of Improbable Research reports that Dr. Richard Stone has been researching the ecological effects of helicopter overflights on King penguins and his preliminary results show that King penguins do not, in fact, fall over ...

How to host an IContextMenu, part 3 – Invocation location

September 23, 2004 Sep 23, 2004 09/23/04
Raymond Chen
One of the bugs you may have noticed in our first attempt at displaying the context menu to the user is that the Properties dialog doesn't show up at the point you clicked. The Properties dialog isn't psychic; it doesn't know where the original mouse click occurred. You have to tell it. CMINVOKECOMMANDINFOEX info = { 0...

How to contact Raymond

September 22, 2004 Sep 22, 2004 09/22/04
Raymond Chen
If your subject matter is a suggestion for a future topic, please post it to the Suggestion Box (using the Suggestion Box link on the side of the page). If you send it to me directly, I will probably lose track of it. If your subject matter is personal (for example "Hi, Raymond, remember me? We went to the same high school..."), you can...

How to host an IContextMenu, part 2 – Displaying the context menu

September 22, 2004 Sep 22, 2004 09/22/04
Raymond Chen
Instead of invoking a fixed verb, we'll ask the user to choose from the context menu and invoke the result. Make these changes to the OnContextMenu function: #define SCRATCH_QCM_FIRST 1 #define SCRATCH_QCM_LAST 0x7FFF #undef HANDLE_WM_CONTEXTMENU #define HANDLE_WM_CONTEXTMENU(hwnd, wParam, lParam, fn) \ ((fn)((hwnd), (HWND)(wParam...

Swedes struggle with the meaning of sick leave

September 21, 2004 Sep 21, 2004 09/21/04
Raymond Chen
As part of the continuing campaign to shed their hard-working stereotype, perhaps taking a cue from their more well-adjusted Norwegian neighbors, Swedes have been taking dubious sick leave in record numbers. [A] study showed 40 percent believe it is enough to feel tired to stay home and draw benefits. A survey of 1,002 Swedes by the ...

Pitfalls in handling the WM_CONTEXTMENU message

September 21, 2004 Sep 21, 2004 09/21/04
Raymond Chen
Before we continue with our IContextMenu discussion, I need to take a little side trip and discuss the subtleties of the WM_CONTEXTMENU message. First, a correction to the existing <windowsx.h> header file: #undef HANDLE_WM_CONTEXTMENU #define HANDLE_WM_CONTEXTMENU(hwnd, wParam, lParam, fn) \ ((fn)((hwnd), (HWND)(wParam), ...