Showing results for Code - The Old New Thing

The method described in the previous coding blog entry works great if you are using the window visibility state to control painting, since you're using the paint system itself to do the heavy lifting for you. To obtain this information outside of the paint loop, use and . The HDC that...

Sometimes you want to perform an activity, such as updating a status window, only as long as the window is not covered by another window. The easiest way to determine this is by not actually trying to determine it. For example, here's how the taskbar clock updates itself...

I get called on frequently to do troubleshooting, so I figure I'd share some entries from my private bag of tricks.  (And there are some remarks for programmers hidden here too.) Problem 1. A folder like opens each time you log on. Reason: Your system contains two ...

Windows XP ships with a number of icon overlays. The black clock is particularly baffling because you sometimes see it even if your system is not equipped with Hierarchical Storage Management. When this happens, it's because some program (...

Sometimes you run into a conflict where you need the controls laid out in one Z-order to get hit-testing to work, but need a different order to get keyboard TAB order working. For example, consider this dialog template, which has been simplified for expository purposes. The ...

GetWindowText() is more complicated than you think. The documentation tries to explain its complexity with small words, which is great if you don't understand long words, but it also means that you're not getting the full story. Here's an attempt to give the full story. How windows manage ...

But it's not finished yet. I hope to get to it later this week...

The WM_SIZING handler intercepts only interactive resizing. If the user right-clicks the taskbar and selects "Cascade Windows", this resizes the window directly without going through the interactive WM_SIZING step...

Enforcing integrality solves the fractional-line problem, but notice that when you grab the top or bottom edge and resize the window, the resize feedback doesn't match the actual window you get back if you drag the window to a non-integral size. (You may need to turn off full window drag to see this effect more...

If you play around with resizing the window, you can get a fractional line to appear at the bottom of the screen. This is not normally a problem until you scroll to the very end of the list, say, by pressing the key, at which point an ugly blank space appears at the bottom. This ugly blank space is ...