\nThis question came in from a customer (paraphrased):\n<\/p>\n
\nIf I run my program from the command prompt, it works great,\nbut if I run it from my launcher via
ShellExecuteEx<\/code>,\nit never appears.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\nSee how good your psychic powers are at solving this problem\nbefore I give you the second question that gives away the answer.\n<\/p>\n
\nAny luck?\n<\/p>\n
\nHere’s a second question from a different source (but which\ncoincidentally came in the same day).\n<\/p>\n
\nI’m trying to use
ShellExecute<\/code> to open a document.\nThe function succeeds (returns a value greater than 32),\nbut I don’t get anything on the screen.\n<\/p>\n\nif (ShellExecute(Handle, NULL, FileName, NULL,\n NULL, NULL) <= (HINSTANCE)32) ...\n<\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\n\nThe problem the second person is having lies in the last parameter\nto the
ShellExecute<\/code> function.\nIt’snShowCmd<\/code>, which is supposed to be an\nSW_*<\/code> value, but which this person is passing as\nNULL<\/code>.\nIt so happens, that the value zero corresponds to\nSW_HIDE<\/code>, which explains why the program doesn’t\nappear: You told it to run hidden!\n<\/p>\n\nNow go back to the first problem.\nDo you see what the person most likely did wrong?\nThe code probably went like this:\n<\/p>\n
\nSHELLEXECUTEINFO sei = { sizeof(sei) };\nsei.hwnd = hwnd;\nsei.lpVerb = TEXT(\"open\");\nsei.lpFile = pszFile;\nShellExecuteEx(&sei);\n<\/pre>\n\nSince the
sei.nShow<\/code> member was not explicitly\nset, the value was implicitly set to zero by the incomplete\ninitializer.\nAnd as we noted above, zero meansSW_HIDE<\/code>.\n<\/p>\n\nIt turns out my psychic debugging was correct.\nThat was indeed the source of the first person’s problem.\nNow you can use your psychic powers, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This question came in from a customer (paraphrased): If I run my program from the command prompt, it works great, but if I run it from my launcher via ShellExecuteEx, it never appears. See how good your psychic powers are at solving this problem before I give you the second question that gives away the […]<\/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":[25],"class_list":["post-29293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-code"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"
This question came in from a customer (paraphrased): If I run my program from the command prompt, it works great, but if I run it from my launcher via ShellExecuteEx, it never appears. See how good your psychic powers are at solving this problem before I give you the second question that gives away the […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29293","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=29293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29293\/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=29293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}