Showing tag results for Code

Continuing from yesterday: The x86 architecture traditionally uses the EBP register to establish a stack frame. A typical function prologue goes like this: This establishes a stack frame that looks like this, for, say, a __stdcall function that takes two parameters. Parameters can be accessed with positive offsets from EBP; for example, par...

Believe it or not, calling conventions is one of the things that programs frequently get wrong. The compiler yells at you when you mismatch a calling convention, but lazy programmers will just stick a cast in there to get the compiler to "shut up already". And then Windows is stuck having to support your buggy code forever. The window procedure ...

The dllexport attribute tells the linker to generate an export table entry for the specified function. This export entry is decorated. This is necessary to support ing of overloaded functions. But it also means that the string you pass to needs to be decorated. As we learned earlier, the decoration scheme varies from architecture to architectur...

Sometimes people ask, "So I know how to get my return address [use the _ReturnAddress() intrinsic]; how do I figure out what DLL that return address belongs to?" Beware. Even if you figure out which DLL the return address belongs to [use Get­Module­Handle­Ex(GET_MODULE_HANDLE_EX_FLAG_FROM_ADDRESS)], that doesn't mean that that is a...

CreateMenu creates a horizontal menu bar, suitable for attaching to a top-level window. This is the sort of menu that says "File, Edit", and so on. CreatePopupMenu creates a vertical popup menu, suitable for use as a submenu of another menu (either a horizontal menu bar or another popup menu) or as the root of a context menu. If you get the two con...

An interface is a contract, but remember that a contract applies to both parties. Most of the time, when you read an interface, you look at it from the point of view of the client side of the contract, but often it helps to read it from the server side. For example, let's look at the interface for control panel applications. Most of the time, ...

Seth asks how he can perform proper exception-handling cleanup if he doesn't know whether he needs to clean up a critical section. I'm using SEH, and have some __try/__except blocks in which the code enters and leaves critical sections. If an exception occurs, I don't know if I'm currently in the CS or not. Even wrapping the code in __try/__finall...

MSDN just published an article telling people that it's okay to use reserved fields in an internal structure. Anybody who does this has just voided their warranty. Please put a "This program has a high likelihood of crashing after you install the next Service Pack or upgrade your OS" in your license agreement.And you wonder why app compat is so ha...

In the old days, Windows didn't bother enforcing a nesting limit because, well, if you want to nest windows 200 deep, that's your decision. Many window operations are recursive, but since everything happened on the application's stack, it was your own responsibility to make your stack big enough so it didn't overflow. But Windows NT moved the windo...

Hey there, everybody. It's going to take me a while to settle in, so please be patient. It seems I always celebrate a new blog by designing some insane multi-part series on some obscure aspect of Win32, so I think I'll welcome this site with a series of articles that demonstrate various things you can do with the shell namespace. I haven't planned ...