What a drag: Dragging a Uniform Resource Locator (URL)
It's still just a string.
It's still just a string.
It's just a string.
Jonathan Wilson asks, "Do you know why there is a GetDlgItemInt and a SetDlgItemInt but not a GetDlgItemFloat and a SetDlgItemFloat?" Give people five dollars and they'll ask why you didn't give them ten. Let's start with the first question. Why is there a function? After all, doesn't do anything you couldn't already do with and . Well, read...
Kevin asks, "Windows XP lets me install applications, delete files, etc., so why does scheduling a task requires a password?" (I guess the answer to this question wasn't obvious since nobody answered it in the suggestion box.) Because scheduled tasks run after you have logged off. All those other operations occur while you are logged on. Yo...
A common mistake I see is people confusing message tables with string resources. This basically shows up in one place: . The folks who were designing Win32 decided that plain string resources weren't fancy enough, so they invented message tables, which is just another way of storing strings in resources. Why string resources weren't good enough ...
One of the predefined security access masks is . You see it used in defining the masks for various objects. Here are just a few examples: The mask is meant to be used when defining access masks for object types. I'm guessing it's called because it's the set of access masks that all securable objects must support. Look at the documentation o...
A common question I see is "How do I find the window that corresponds to an ?" This question comes pre-loaded with the assumption that there is only one window that corresponds to an , which is true for only the most rudimentary of Win32 programs. Even a simple program like Notepad has more than one window with the same , as Spy quickly reveals. ...
Mike Williams asked in the Suggestion Box why Explorer shows a + sign next to a folder even though it doesn't have any children. Mind you, this wasn't a suggestion; it was just a random question. I don't enjoy answering random questions about specific details of user interface elements since, as it turns out, I did not write every single user inte...
Sometimes people think they can switch stacks by just loading a new value into the register. This may seem to work but in fact it doesn't, because there is more to switching stacks than just loading a new value into . On the x86, the exception chain is threaded through the stack, and the exception dispatch code verifies that the exception chain...
This is one of those things that is obvious to me, but perhaps is not obvious to everyone. An object establishes what can be done with it. Any rights granted by the object go to the creator. The creator can in turn grant rights to others. But if you're a third party to the object/creator relationship, you can't just step in and start messing around...