The Old New Thing

Supplementary reading on the subject of anonymous functions and other CLR topics

August 11, 2008 Aug 11, 2008 08/11/08

Raymond Chen

Welcome to CLR Week 2008. I'm going to mix it up and start with a link listing. Other CLR topics...

If you return FALSE from DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH, will you get a DLL_PROCESS_DETACH?

August 8, 2008 Aug 8, 2008 08/8/08

Raymond Chen

If you return from , will you get a ? Yes. No. ... Yes. All three answers are correct, for different formulations of the question. From the kernel's point of view, the answer is a simple Yes. If a DLL's entry point returns to the notification, it will receive a notification. However, most C and C++ programs do not use ...

The caret serves as the continuation character for batch files

August 6, 2008 Aug 6, 2008 08/6/08

Raymond Chen

We saw earlier that the caret is the escape character for the batch language. In a comment to that article, KJK::Hyperion mentioned that the caret serves as the line continuation character. A useful tip if you still find yourself messing with batch files. Mark Yocum elaborates on this point a bit more...

I warned you: The dangers of attaching input queues

August 1, 2008 Aug 1, 2008 08/1/08

Raymond Chen

Some people didn't take to heart my cautions on the subject of attached input queues, item number five on the list of five things every Win32 programmer should know. And then they find that their application stops responding. // Code in italics is wrong void TryToStealFocus(HWND hwnd) { // First try plain SetForegroundWindow ...

Simulating a drop, part two

July 25, 2008 Jul 25, 2008 07/25/08

Raymond Chen

Last time, we wrote a tiny program to simulate dropping a file on another file, but we discovered that it didn't work for dropping a file onto Mail Recipient.MAPIMail. The reason, as you no doubt instantly recognized, is that the MAPIMail handler creates a worker thread, and we're exiting the process before the worker thread has finished its ...

Reading a contract from the other side: Simulating a drop

July 24, 2008 Jul 24, 2008 07/24/08

Raymond Chen

Most people, when they think of the IDropTarget interface, think only of implementing a drop target. But you can read the contract from the other side, because the description of how a drag source interacts with a drop target tells you how to be a drag source. To summarize, the sequence of drop target operations go like this: IDropTarget...

Theorize if you want, but if the problem is right there in front of you, why not go for the facts?

July 23, 2008 Jul 23, 2008 07/23/08

Raymond Chen

On an internal discussion list, somebody asked a question similar to this: My program launches a helper program. This helper program does different things based on the command line parameters, but the way I'm using it, it just prints its results to the console and exits. When I launch this program and wait for it to exit, my wait never ...

MessageBoxIndirect loads the icon itself; you can’t hand it a pre-loaded icon

July 21, 2008 Jul 21, 2008 07/21/08

Raymond Chen

Commenter 8 wants to know how to tell the function to use an existing instead of pointing it to an icon resource. You can't. The loads the icon itself. You can't hand it a pre-loaded icon. Of course, it's hardly rocket science to write your own function that lets you use whatever icon you want. There's no law that says all Yes/No ...

How did the invalid floating point operand exception get raised when I disabled it?

July 3, 2008 Jul 3, 2008 07/3/08

Raymond Chen

Last time, we learned about the dangers of uninitialized floating point variables but left with a puzzle: Why wasn't this caught during internal testing? I dropped a hint when I described how s work: You have to ask the processor to raise an exception when it encounters a signaling NaN, and the program disabled that exception. Why was an ...

Uninitialized floating point variables can be deadly

July 2, 2008 Jul 2, 2008 07/2/08

Raymond Chen

A colleague of mine related to me this story about uninitialized floating point variables. He had a function that went something like this, simplified for expository purposes. The infoType parameter specified which piece of information you're requesting, and depending on what you're asking for, one or the other of the output parameters may ...