Showing tag results for Code

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...

The notifications used by the common controls are used when the control asks its parent to generate information that had been marked as delay-rendered, either explicitly via values such as or implicitly by being an owner-data control, for example. In fact the control is really just the middle man between the code that requested information about...

A commenter asked, "As an application programmer, can I really ignore DDE if I need to interact with explorer/shell?" The answer is, "Yes, please!" While it was a reasonable solution back in the cooperatively-multitasked world of 16-bit Windows where it was invented, the transition to 32-bit Windows was not a nice one for DDE. Specifically, the ...

It's not all that useful any more.

Okay, now that we know what operations is meant to be used with, we can look at various ways people misuse the function for things unrelated to dragging. People see the "the window you lock won't be able to redraw itself" behavior of and use it as a sort of lazy version of the message. Though sending the message really isn't that much harder ...