The Old New Thing

Another different type of dialog procedure

The other method of using a window-procedure-like dialog box is to change the rules of the game. Normally, the window procedure for a dialog box is the function, which calls the dialog procedure and then takes action if the dialog procedure indicated that it desired the default action to take place. The dialog procedure is subservient to...

Answer to previous exercise about m_fRecursing

Answer to previous exercise: The flag does not need to be per-instance. It only needs to be valid long enough that the recursive call that comes immediately afterwards can be detected. However, a global variable would not work because two threads might be inside the recursive call simultaneously. But a thread-local variable would work. (...

A different type of dialog procedure

In the discussion following my entry about dialog procedure return values, somebody suggested an alternate dialog design where you just call to do default actions (the same way you write window procedures and ) rather than returning TRUE/FALSE. So let's do that. In fact, we're going to do it twice. I'll cover one method today and cover an...

Welcome Martyn Lovell

Martyn Lovell from the VC++ team has joined the world of blogging. Martyn is a smart guy, even though he does spell some words funny...

How much do you expect from a framework layer?

If a framework exposes functionality provided by a lower layer, how hard should the framework try to insulate you from all the quirks and limitations of the lower layer? Instinctively, of course, you would say, "The framework should insulate me completely." But be careful what you ask for. If a ...

A warning to people averse to code

This is going to be a code-heavy week. People who are averse to code may want to just lie low until next week. I'll try to make it up by having next week be more storytelling-focused...

Returning values from a dialog procedure

For some reason, the way values are returned from a dialog procedure confuses people, so I'm going to try to explain it a different way. The trick with dialog box procedures is realizing that they actually need to return two pieces of information: ...