Showing tag results for Code

Some time ago, I opined that should really be called and you really should just let the program crash if somebody passes you a bad pointer. It is common to put pointer validation code at the start of functions for debugging purposes (as long as you don't make logic decisions based on whether the pointer is valid). But if you can't use , how can...

Commenter Chris 'Xenon' Hanson points out that fiddling with the style directly via leads to strange behavior. However it isn't the case that "most widget classes work fine." Reaching in and fiddling the style bit directly is like reaching into a program's internal variables and just changing the values: All the other work that is associated wi...

A customer wanted to know how to launch Explorer's Search window with specific fixed search criteria. It turns out that there are two ways of doing this, the poor man's way and the overachiever's way. The overachiever's way is actually easier to discover. You can use the search-ms protocol to generate a command string that describes the query you...

The structure contains a number of fields which record the last time a particular action occurred. Two of the fields seem to describe the same thing. Last­Write­Time The time the file was last written to. Change­Time The time the file was changed. What's the difference between writing to a file and changing it? I'm told that th...

If a shell namespace item has the attribute, then it is a shortcut to another location. The most common type of shortcut is the file, which you can load by creating the object and using , but what if you have some other type of shortcut? How do you know what CLSID to use? Since anybody can create their own shortcut file types, a hard-coded li...

A customer reported problems launching the default Web browser with the function: This fails with . If you don't pass the flag and leave , then the function will try to figure out what your refers to, looking at the file extension, looking for the file on the , and if all else fails, trying some autocorrection. In this case, the customer...

Commenter Andrei asks via the Suggestion Box for help with making the text transparent using . "Instead of the radio button now there's a black background." Let's look at this problem in stages. First, let's ignore the transparent part and figure out how to render text without a black background. The background color of the text comes from the ...

The evolving shape of the pixel.

Via the suggestion box, Sys64738 asks, whether I think is a good C/C++ programming style to add IN and OUT to function prototypes. Remember, this is my opinion. Your opinion may validly differ. I would go beyond just IN and OUT and step up to SAL annotations, which describe the semantics of function parameters in more detail than simply IN and ...

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...