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The mechanism for keeping track of window hooks was very different in 16-bit Windows. The functions involved were , and . The first two functions still exist today, but the third one has been replaced with a macro: Disclaimer: All code below is "reconstructed from memory". The spirit of the code is intact, but the precise details may be off. ...

A threaded linked list.

The whole point of dynamic link libraries (DLLs) is that the linkage is dynamic. Whereas statically-linked libraries are built into the final product, a module that uses a dynamically-linked library merely says, "I would like function X from Y.DLL, please." This technique has advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is more efficient use of stor...

When I discussed some time ago why minimized windows have an apparent size of 160x31, I explained that the minimized icon is a miniature title bar, but I managed not to explain why the values are exactly 160 and 31. The width of the miniature title bar is determined by the member of structure. You can retrieve and change this structure with the...

As we saw earlier, the "Add or Remove Programs" control panel used several heuristics to attempt to determine things like program size and frequency of user. Why did it bother doing this at all? At the time the feature was added, disk space was not cheap like it is today. One of the problems users were having was running out of disk space and not...

The pager control was introduced with the common controls library that came with Internet Explorer 4.0 in order to assist in implementing scrolling menus on the Start menu and Favorites menu. (The Start menu and Favorites menu aren't really menus in the Win32 sense. They are custom controls written to act like menus; the fakemenu sample prov...

Last time, I talked about the historical background for the class style and why it starts out sounding like a good idea but when you think about it some more turns out to be an awful idea. The class style is the same thing, but worse, for it takes all the problems of and magnifies them. Recall that the class style instructs the window manage...

Recall that window DCs are most commonly used only temporarily. If you need to draw into a window, you call or, if outside of a paint cycle, , although painting outside of a paint cycle is generally to be avoided. The window manager produces a DC for the window and returns it. You use the DC, then restore it to its original state and return it to...

A story in honor of Katie Couric's final day at the Today show. Last month I happened to run into a former member of the shell team who worked on the Windows XP Welcome screen. He told me a story from CES 2001, where Windows XP's interface (code-named Luna) was unveiled. There was going to be a segment on the Today show, and the We...

In former times very cross-platform NTVDM was.