Showing results for Code - The Old New Thing

Commenter Gareth asked why, when the system metrics change and the taskbar changes size to match, the taskbar doesn't return to its original size when the metrics return to their previous values. Because the taskbar doesn't remember the path of changes that led to its current state. It just knows its current state. Let's say the taskbar is 30 pi...

Here's a question that floated past my field of view some time ago: When the mouse hovers over a disabled window, the tooltip associated with that window does not appear. Why is this? Why isn't this documented in MSDN? Actually, you already know the answer, and it is documented. You just have to connect the dots. When a window is disabled, it d...

Because one thread is all it needs.

The function takes a pointer to a buffer () and a size (), and that size is the size of the buffer, in bytes. No really, that's what it is. The application compatibility folks found one popular game which wasn't quite sure what that parameter meant. The programmers must have thought it meant "The size of the version resources you want to loa...

Commenter Mike Petry asked via the Suggestion Box: Why can you dereference a COM interface pointer and pass it to a function with a Com interface reference. The call. The function called. I found some code written like this during a code review. It is wrong but it seems to work. You already know the answer to this question. You mere...

Here's a problem "inspired by actual events": I have a sequential stream that is the response to a request I sent to a web site. The format of the stream is rather messy; it comes with a variable-length header that describes what type of data is being returned. I want to read that header and then hand the stream to an appropriate handler. But t...

As we've seen a few times already (when building context menus and exploring fiber-based enumeration), composition is an important concept in object-oriented programming. Today, we're going to compose two sequential streams by concatenation. There really isn't much to it. The idea is to take two streams and start by reading from the first one....

Most of the menu item functions such as allow you specify the menu item either by position or by command. Some of them use the and flags. Others separate the search algorithm into a separate flag. Searching for menu items by position is straightforward: The specified position is used as a zero-based index into the menu. In other words, the fir...

Continuing in the extremely sporadic series on the format of resources, today we'll take a look at accelerator tables. This topic is so simple, I'll cover both 16-bit and 32-bit resources on the same day! In 16-bit Windows, the format of an accelerator table resource was simply an array of structures. This array is the same array you would ...

There are many functions that return strings called "display names". And the only thing you can do with display names is display them. Don't assume that the string actually means anything, because it doesn't. Theoretically, a function like could be implemented as and your program should still work. (Of course, this is merely a ground rule. S...