Showing results for Code - The Old New Thing

There are many ways, depending on how wide a scope you want. If there is one specific window that you want to follow right-to-left layout rules, then you pass the extended window style when you create the window. This extended style is inherited by child windows, so once you set a top-level window to have right-to-left layout, all child windows w...

A customer was having problems with the small icon that appears in the upper left corner of the caption: In my program, I need to enable and disable the Close button programmatically, since the program sometimes goes into a state where I don't want the user to close it. I do this by removing the style when I want to disable the Close button, an...

As expected, everybody concluded that the Windows Vista copy progress dialog made every wrong decision possible. Let's look at some of the suggestions on making it suck less: Why not update the file name every five seconds to the file that is being copied at that time? Sure, you could do that, but the cost of getting the name is part of the prob...

One of my colleagues tipped me off to some additional resources on the subject of using the DropTarget technique for accepting files for execution. First, it turns out that there is an SDK sample that demonstrates the DropTarget technique after all. This sample is fifteen years late according to one commenter who apparently thinks that the Plat...

I mentioned last time that there's an optimization in the treatment of the system menu which significantly reduces the number of menus in the system. When a window has the window style, it has a system menu, but until somebody calls on that window, nobody knows what its menu handle is. Until that point, the window manager doesn't actually have ...

Our old friend Norman Diamond wonders when you are supposed to destroy a menu and when you are supposed to let Windows destroy it. The rules for when the window manager implicitly destroys menus are actually not that complicated. Outside of the above situations, you are on your own. Of course, when I write that "you are on your own" I do ...

A customer had the following question: I'm looking for a way to get the height of text which consists entirely of digits, for example , as these characters do not have any descent or internal leading. I expected functions like to return the character's ascent minus the internal leading, but in fact it returns the ascent plus the descent plus t...

The function lets you attach autocomplete functionality to an edit control, and there are flags that describe what sources you want the autocomplete to draw from. If you call a second time, the second set of flags replace the original flags. The flags do not accumulate. For example, if you first call , and then you later call , the result is tha...

As the Windows Server 2003 project wound down, somebody reported a serious bug that went something like this: Subject: Windows Server 2003 still refers to itself as Windows .NET Server Previous versions of Windows report the product name correctly, but Windows Server 2003 still calls itself "Windows .NET Server" instead of Windows Server 2003...

Commenter Yaron wants to know how to use the new IDropTarget mechanism for receiving a list of files to open. (Also asked by Anthony Wieser as a comment to an article.) The MSDN documentation on Verbs and File Assocations mentions that DDE has been deprecated as a way of launching documents and that you should use the DropTarget method instead....