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A commenter named "Al" wondered why the window manager couldn't just take over behavior that used to be within the application's purview, such as painting the non-client area, in order to avoid problems with applications not responding to messages promptly enough. If the window manager were being rewritten, then perhaps it could. But to do it now ...

There are some basic ground rules that apply to all system programming, so obvious that most documentation does not bother explaining them because these rules should have been internalized by practitioners of the art to the point where they need not be expressed. In the same way that when plotting driving directions you wouldn't even consider takin...

Many people have noticed that the animation bar control in version 6 of the common controls no longer uses a background thread to draw the animation. Instead, it acts as if the style is always set, even if the caller didn't pass it. Why is that? The first reason is that the background thread didn't actually help any. In order to draw transparent ...

At the PDC, one person came to talk to me for advice on a resource management problem they were having. To simplify, their system generated dozens of work items, each of which required significant resource consumption. For the sake of illustration, let's say that each of the work items was a single-threaded computationally-intensive operation that ...

If you have a synchronization object, say a semaphore, and two threads waiting on the semaphore, and you then release two semaphore tokens with a single call to , you would expect that each of the waiting threads would be woken, each obtaining one token. And in fact, that's what happens—most of the time. Recall in our discussion of why the ...

Some people may have noticed that the is defined as the combination of and : Since includes , it is impossible to get a caption without a border. Sometimes people don't quite get this and keep asking the question over and over again, and I have to keep trying to explain the laws of logic in different ways until one of them finally sinks in...

Some people have noticed that there is no message that lets you disable the Cancel button on a wizard. This is on purpose. Usability studies reveal that users find it extremely frustrating when they get partway through a wizard and then decide they don't want to perform the operation after all, but find that the wizard doesn't give them a way to ca...

On occasion, you might notice that every window on the desktop flickers and repaints itself. One of the causes for this is a simple null handle bug. The function is one you're probably well-familiar with. It is used to indicate to the window manager that the pixels of a particular window are no longer current and should be repainted. (You can opt...

I have not forgotten about the Chinese/English dictionary series, but I simply haven't had the motivation to sit down and write up descriptions and discussion for the code that I wrote along the way, so instead of adding to the program, I'm going to answer some questions that were asked back when I started the series but which I didn't respond to a...

I'm satisfied with the MSDN documentation for the message, but for the sake of mind-numbing completeness, I'm going to state the obvious in the hope that you, dear readers, can use this technique to fill in the obvious in other parts of MSDN. The one-line summary of the message says, "The WM_COMMAND message is sent when the user selects a com...