{"id":17803,"date":"2009-06-22T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-06-22T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2009\/06\/22\/why-does-a-flashing-taskbar-result-in-a-fullscreen-console-returning-to-windowed-mode\/"},"modified":"2009-06-22T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2009-06-22T10:00:00","slug":"why-does-a-flashing-taskbar-result-in-a-fullscreen-console-returning-to-windowed-mode","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20090622-00\/?p=17803","title":{"rendered":"Why does a flashing taskbar result in a fullscreen console returning to windowed mode?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Commenter <a href=\"http:\/\/drv.nu\">Daniel<\/a> wonders <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/pages\/407234.aspx#601279\"> why a flashing taskbar results in a fullscreen console returning to windowed mode<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p> I didn&#8217;t know the answer to this, but I formulated a guess, and I was ready to just post my guess. (Because everything I write is just conjecture anyway. Informed conjecture, but still.) But I had some time, so I went spelunking through the code history and about a half hour later, I found confirmation for my guess, so now it&#8217;s not just a guess but a fact. (Don&#8217;t expect me to go to all this effort in general. Guessing is a lot less time-consuming.) <\/p>\n<p> The code to force a fullscreen console into windowed mode when a window flashes was introduced in Windows&nbsp;2000, and I even found the bug report that led to the change, suitably edited of course: <\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"m\">\n<p> <b>Title<\/b>: A flashing window should ensure that the taskbar (and the window itself?) are both visible<br> <b>Date submitted<\/b>: November 7, 1997<br> <\/p>\n<p> This is a problem similar to the auto-hide taskbar situation. If the taskbar is not visible, it has to be shown when flashed. This may force a full screen switch. <\/p>\n<p> If the system is in full screen mode (ie, open a command window and type alt-enter), then if someone calls FlashWindow the user won&#8217;t see the flashing window. So we have to make the screen switch to windowed mode. This is especially bad when someone calls SetForegroundWindow but we don&#8217;t let him take the foreground; we simply flash the window instead. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p> The bug report pretty much lays out the justification for this change in behavior, so I&#8217;ll leave it as it is. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Commenter Daniel wonders why a flashing taskbar results in a fullscreen console returning to windowed mode. I didn&#8217;t know the answer to this, but I formulated a guess, and I was ready to just post my guess. (Because everything I write is just conjecture anyway. Informed conjecture, but still.) But I had some time, so [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-17803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Commenter Daniel wonders why a flashing taskbar results in a fullscreen console returning to windowed mode. I didn&#8217;t know the answer to this, but I formulated a guess, and I was ready to just post my guess. (Because everything I write is just conjecture anyway. Informed conjecture, but still.) But I had some time, so [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17803"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17803\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}