Showing tag results for Code

Commenter Francois Boucher asks it's better to write a background worker thread that polls with and a flag, or polls by waiting for an event with a timeout? "Which scenario is better? The first one uses only 1 handle for the thread. The second one will use 2. But is the first scenario wasting more thread time? Is it worth using the event (ker...

A customer had the following question about the message compiler, something that I had noted almost nobody uses. Well how do you do, we found somebody who actually uses it. Anyway, the question went like this (paraphrased, as always): Can I use symbolic constants in my .mc file? For example, I have a message file that goes like this: I hav...

So far this week, we've separated the DIB metadata () from the pixels of a DIB section. But there's really no need for the DIB section at all! As long as you have the pixels and the metadata, you can draw bits. We demonstrate this by drawing a rather stupid-looking bitmap onto the screen, but doing so without the use of s at all! Start with a b...

It's been quite a while, but a winner in the caption contest has been selected and the prize finally reached its destination. (Mostly due to procrastination on my part. Don't blame the postal service.) The winner is Scott from Australia with his entry Only 5,000 more referrals until MULTIBALL Even though it's kind of low-brow, it made me lau...

For a few days now, we've used the function in conjunction with a precomputed to draw a DIB with an alternate color table without modifying the . The function operates like a with raster operation . If you want another raster operation, you can use , which has a final raster operation parameter. Despite its name, you don't have to stretch w...

Last time, we saw that you can use the function to draw a DIB with an alternate color table without having to modify the . In that version of the function, we selected the into a device context in preparation for drawing from it, but in fact that step isn't necessary for drawing. It was merely necessary to get the original color table so we cou...

If I were Michael Kaplan, I'd have a more clever title like I'm not touching you! or Look but don't touch or maybe Looking at a DIB through -colored glasses. We saw some time ago that you can manipulate the DIB color table to perform wholesale color remapping. But in fact you can do this even without modifying the DIB color table, which is a h...

Whenever the issue of DLL dependencies arises, I can count on somebody arguing that these dynamic dependencies should be tracked, even if doing so cannot be proven to be reliable. Even if one could walk the call stack reliably, you would still get it wrong. The example I gave originally was the common helper library, where loads via an intermed...

Commenter Herb wondered how a 32-bit program running on 64-bit Windows can allocate more than 4GB of memory. Easy: The same way it allocates more than 4GB of memory on 32-bit Windows! Over a year before Herb asked the question, I had already answered it in the tediously boring two-week series on the myths surrounding the /3GB switch. Here's a pa...

Commenter Matthew Chaboud asks if there's an easy way to consume all the virtual address space below 4GB, short of, well, actually allocating it. "It seems like there should be a cleaner way to do this." If you want to consume all the virtual address space, then call until you turn blue. Programs shouldn't care what address they get back from ...