In order to do drag-drop rearrangement of menus, you need four things, most of which we already know how to do. Dragging an item out of a menu. Check. Dropping an item into a menu. Check. Connecting the drag with the drop. Rearranging menu items in response to the operation. Let's do step 4 first, just to mix things up. ...
Last time, we looked at using the style for dragging items out of a menu. Today, we'll look at dropping them in. Take the program from last time and make the following additions. First, let's add a second item to the menu. Yes, I hard-coded another path. This is a demo, not production code. Anyway, it's time to hook up the message: To...
Windows 2000 introduced the menu style, which permits drag/drop operations in a menu. Nobody uses this style, probably because it's totally undiscoverable by the end-user. But I'll write a sample program anyway. Mind you, I knew nothing about the menu style until I started writing this entry. But I simply read the documentation, which say...
Over the years, I've seen a bunch of coding anti-patterns. I figured maybe I'll share a few. Today, I'll introduce what I'm calling the for-if anti-pattern, also known as "We'll sell you the whole seat, but you'll only need the edge." This is a special case of the for-case anti-pattern, where all but one of the cases is null. This can natural...
A customer was having trouble obtaining information from a shortcut file. "Here is a sample program that tries to print the target of a shortcut file, but it only gets the file name without a directory. How do I get the full path?" Recall that the structure contains only a file name in the member. It doesn't have any path information. The st...
Given an , how does one determine whether the language lays out left-to-right or right-to-left? One suggestion was simply to hard-code the list of known right-to-left languages, and if the language isn't on the list, then assume that it is left-to-right. This technique is clearly fragile, because Windows adds support for new languages not infrequen...
There is a class of messages which are generated on demand rather than explicitly posted into a message queue. If you call or and the queue is empty, then the window manager will look to see if one of these generated-on-demand messages is due, messages like , , and . Neil wonders, "In that program that called 100,000 times, how many paint messa...
Sort of like unix, but the other way around.
The last time I mentioned programmatic access to SkyDrive was last June, where I noted that the interface was given the confusing name Messenger Connect. At least now they renamed it to Live Connect, which is slightly less confusing. The SkyDrive folks have been pretty busy lately. A few days ago, Dare Obasanjo announced a new Live Connect SDK,...
A customer wanted a way to determine whether a particular window is modal. They listed a few methods they had tried but found that it didn't work and asked for assistance. As Eric Lippert is fond of saying, "First, write your spec." Until you know what you want, you won't know how to get it. First, you need to define what you mean by a modal w...
