Showing tag results for Code

Nov 23, 2007
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The forgotten common controls: The GetEffectiveClientRect function

Raymond Chen

The function is another one in the category of functions that everybody tries to pretend doesn't exist. It's not as bad as , but it's still pretty awful. The idea behind the function is that you have a frame window with a bunch of optional gadgets, such as a status bar or toolbar. The important thing is that these optional gadgets all reside at...

Code
Nov 19, 2007
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If you want a menu that shows the contents of the My Computer folder, you already know how to do it

Raymond Chen

Commenter praful asks what to me is a rather confused question, but I'll try to guess what the real question is. If you drag My Computer to the Start button in XP, you get an expanding menu that lets you see all files and folders as submenus. Is this menu available to applications via an API, or do you have to build it yourself? For example, c...

Code
Nov 12, 2007
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I don't know what the Lotus internal clipboard formats are either

Raymond Chen

Apparently some people think my psychic powers extend to being able to steal trade secrets by sheer force of concentration. I've been trying to write an application which allows to drag and drop documents from lotus notes. If I just drag and drop a document from lotus notes to Windows explorer, it creates a .shb file (regular windows document li...

Code
Nov 9, 2007
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You just have to accept that the file system can change

Raymond Chen

A customer who is writing some sort of code library wants to know how they should implement a function that determines whether a file exists. The usual way of doing this is by calling , but what they've found is that sometimes will report that a file exists, but when they get around to accessing the file, they get the error . The lesser questi...

CodeThings I've written that have amused other people
Nov 6, 2007
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VirtualLock only locks your memory into the working set

Raymond Chen

When you lock memory with it locks the memory into your process's working set. It doesn't mean that the memory will never be paged out. It just means that the memory won't be paged out as long as there is a thread executing in your process, because a process's working set need be present in memory only when the process is actually executing. (Ear...

Code
Nov 5, 2007
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Why do we even have the DefWindowProc function?

Raymond Chen

Some time ago, I looked at two ways of reimplementing the dialog procedure (method 1, method 2). Commenter "8" wondered why we have a function at all. Couldn't window procedures have followed the dialog box model, where they simply return to indicate that they want default processing to occur? Then there would be no need to export th...

Code
Nov 1, 2007
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Why does GetDiskFreeSpaceEx return the wrong amount of free space?

Raymond Chen

One customer discovered that viewing the properties of a drive from Explorer shows the amount of disk free space significantly lower than the actual amount of free disk space as resported by the disk management snap-in. The command prompt agrees with Explorer and shows the incorrect result. What's going on? Not surprisingly, both Explorer and the ...

Code
Oct 26, 2007
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If you pass enough random numbers, eventually one of them will look valid

Raymond Chen

One customer traced a problem they were having to the way they were calling a function similar in spirit to this one: This function takes a clipboard format and looks for it on the clipboard. If found, it returns a copy of the data. Looks great, huh? The problem is that the customer would sometimes call the function as . The clipboard form...

Code
Oct 24, 2007
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What's the difference between LVM_HITTEST and LVM_INSERTMARKHITTEST?

Raymond Chen

One customer was confused by the two list view hit-test messages and . What is the difference between the two? The message tries to find the item the point is over. The message tries to find the item the point is next to. For example, suppose you have two 32×32 items, item zero at (0, 0) and item one at (0, 32). You use whe...

Code
Oct 22, 2007
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The best way to process Unicode input is to make somebody else do it

Raymond Chen

Andrew M asks via the Suggestion Box: I was hoping you could address how to properly code Unicode character input. It seems like a lot of applications don't support it correctly. I'm not sure I understand the question, but the answer is pretty easy: Don't do it! Text input is hard. It should be left to the professionals. This means you should...

Code