The Old New Thing

Does Microsoft internally use MFC for writing Windows apps?

January 15, 2007 Jan 15, 2007 01/15/07
Raymond Chen
Craig Ward figures that if he asks enough questions I might answer one of them. "Does Microsoft internally use MFC for writing Windows apps? How about VB?" People use whatever they decide best meets the requirements for the task at hand. That could be a batch file, a C++ program, a perl script, a web page with a bunch of JScript, use your ...

How do I print the contents of a rich text control?

January 12, 2007 Jan 12, 2007 01/12/07
Raymond Chen
For some reason, people are really puzzled by rich edit printing. I'm no expert on printing, but even I was able to figure it out. The kernel is the message. Each time you call it, a little bit more of the rich text control is printed, and the message returns the index of the first unprinted character, which you can pass back in to print the...

How do I put more than 32,000 characters into a rich text control?

January 11, 2007 Jan 11, 2007 01/11/07
Raymond Chen
Last time we looked at loading an entire file into a rich text control. The code runs great, until you try to use it to display a license agreement provided by your legal department, and then some paranoid user reports that they can't read past page seven. (What, somebody reads those things?) What's going on? If you don't specify otherwise...

Ken Levine teaches us about television script writing

January 10, 2007 Jan 10, 2007 01/10/07
Raymond Chen
Ken Levine has written for some of the most well-known television programs of the past few decades. M*A*S*H, Cheers (for which he won an Emmy), Frasier. And that's not counting his second (third? fourth?) career as a baseball announcer. He writes about whatever is on his mind, be it Barry Bonds' 715th home run, what not to put into your ...

How do I load an entire file into a rich text control?

January 10, 2007 Jan 10, 2007 01/10/07
Raymond Chen
To load an entire file into a rich text control, you can use the message, which accepts an of data all at once. Once you find the message, it's pretty straightforward how to use it, but I'll write out the code anyway; You pretty much follow your nose. The message wants you to tell it the format of the stream () and provide a pointer to ...

What triggers the recall of an offline file?

January 9, 2007 Jan 9, 2007 01/9/07
Raymond Chen
Hierarchical storage management is one of the taxes software developers have to pay. What can you safely do to an offline file? What will trigger its recall? (First, a note on terminology: Recalling a file means to restore it from remote storage to local storage. A file that has been recalled is online; a file that has been placed on remote ...

Why do property sheets sometimes take a first-chance exception?

January 8, 2007 Jan 8, 2007 01/8/07
Raymond Chen
Reader cmonachan asked why can cause a first-chance exception. This is mentioned in Knowledge Base article 158552. But why take the exception in the first place? First off, let's take MFC out of the picture. The first-chance exception is coming from the property sheet manager. MFC is just the middle-man. Okay, so why the first-chance ...

What('s) a character!

January 5, 2007 Jan 5, 2007 01/5/07
Raymond Chen
Norman Diamond seems to have made a side career of harping on this topic on a fairly regular basis, although he never comes out and says that this is what he's complaining about. He just assumes everybody knows. (This usually leads to confusion, as you can see from the follow-ups.) Back in the ANSI days, terminology was simpler. Windows ...