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As we learned yesterday, nonstatic member functions take a secret "this" parameter, which makes them incompatible with the function signature required by Win32 callbacks. Fortunately, nearly all callbacks provide some way of providing context. You can shove the "this" pointer into the context so you can reconstruct the source object. Here's an ex...

Okay, here we go: The 32-bit x86 calling conventions. (By the way, in case people didn't get it: I'm only talking in the context of calling conventions you're likely to encounter when doing Windows programming or which are used by Microsoft compilers. I do not intend to cover calling conventions for other operating systems or that are specific to a...

Foreshadowing: This information will actually be useful in a future discussion. Well, not the fine details, but you may notice something that explains... um... it's hard to describe. Just wait for it. Curiously, it is only the 8086 and x86 platforms that have multiple calling conventions. All the others have only one! Now we're going deep into t...

A walk back through history.

The great thing about calling conventions on the x86 platform is that there are so many to choose from! In the 16-bit world, part of the calling convention was fixed by the instruction set: The BP register defaults to the SS selector, whereas the other registers default to the DS selector. So the BP register was necessarily the register used for a...

Because every app that gets blocked is another reason for people not to upgrade to the next version of Windows. Look at all these programs that would have stopped working when you upgraded from Windows 3.0 to Windows 3.1. Actually, this list is only partial. Many times, the compatibility fix is made inside the core component for all programs rath...

Three examples off the top of my head of the consequences of grovelling into and relying on undocumented structures. Defragmenting things that can't be defragmented In Windows 2000, there are several categories of things that cannot be defragmented. Directories, exclusively-opened files, the MFT, the pagefile... That didn't stop a certain software...

I think it was Internet Explorer 5.0, when we discovered that a thirdparty browser extension had a serious bug, the details of which aren't important. The point was that this bug was so vicious, it crashed IE pretty frequently. Not good. To protect the users from this horrible fate, we marked the object as "bad" so IE wouldn't load it. And then we...

In a comment, somebody asked what the deal was with the unsafe device removal dialog in Windows 2000 and why it's gone in Windows XP. I wasn't involved with that dialog, but here's what I remember: The device was indeed removed unsafely. If it was a USB storage device, for example, there may have been unflushed I/O buffers. If it were a printer, t...

You may have noticed that Windows as a general rule checks structure sizes strictly. For example, consider the MENUITEMINFO structure: Notice that the size of this structure changes depending on whether WINVER >= 0x0500 (i.e., whether you are targetting Windows 2000 or higher). If you take the Windows 2000 version of this structure and pass ...