Showing results for Code - The Old New Thing

Before we continue with our IContextMenu discussion, I need to take a little side trip and discuss the subtleties of the WM_CONTEXTMENU message. First, a correction to the existing <windowsx.h> header file: #undef HANDLE_WM_CONTEXTMENU #define HANDLE_WM_CONTEXTMENU(hwnd, wParam, lParam, fn) \ ((fn)((hwnd), (HWND)(wParam), GET_X_LPAR...

Most documentation describes how to plug into the shell context menu structure and be a context menu provider. If you read the documentation from the other side, then you also see how to host the context menu. (This is the first of an eleven-part series with three digressions. Yes, eleven parts—sorry for all you folks who are in it just fo...

The flag changes the behavior of .NET regular expressions. One of the changes I had discussed earlier was with respect to matching digits. For those who want to know more, a summary of the differences is documented in MSDN under the devious title "ECMAScript vs. Canonical Matching Behavior". Apparently some people had trouble finding that page...

Interlocked operations are a high-performance way of updating DWORD-sized or pointer-sized values in an atomic manner. Note, however, that this doesn't mean that you can avoid the critical section. For example, suppose you have a critical section that protects a variable, and in some other part of the code, you want to update the variable atomi...

A commenter asked why the original window order is not always preserved when you undo a Show Desktop. The answer is "Because the alternative is worse." Guaranteeing that the window order is restored can result in Explorer hanging. When the windows are restored when you undo a Show Desktop, Explorer goes through and asks each window that it...

For some reason, this question gets asked a lot. How do I convert a byte[] to a System.String? (Yes, this is a CLR question. Sorry.) You can use String System.Text.UnicodeEncoding.GetString() which takes a byte[] array and produces a string. Note that this is not the same as just blindly copying the bytes from the byte[] array into a hunk of ...

Einstein discovered that simultaneity is relative. This is also true of computing. People will ask, "Is it okay to do X on one thread and Y on another thread simultaneously?" Here are some examples: You can answer this question knowing nothing about the internal behavior of those operations. All you need to know are some physics and the ...

For some reason, some people go to enormous lengths to locate the Internet Explorer binary so they can launch it with some options. The way to do this is not to do it. If you just pass "IEXPLORE.EXE" to the ShellExecute function [link fixed 9:41am], it will go find Internet Explorer and run it. ShellExecute(NULL, "open", "iexplore.exe", ...

In an earlier article, I gave an example of reading a contract from the other side. Here's another example of how you can read a specification and play the role of the operating system. I chose this particular example because somebody wanted to do this and didn't realize that everything they needed was already documented; they just needed to look...

Some Windows structures are variable-sized, beginning with a fixed header, followed by a variable-sized array. When these structures are declared, they often declare an array of size 1 where the variable-sized array should be. For example: typedef struct _TOKEN_GROUPS { DWORD GroupCount; SID_AND_ATTRIBUTES Groups[ANYSIZE_ARRAY]; } TOKEN...