9 posts
I have been using a utility function in my TaskbarExt application for years to get the current Desktop ListView window handle (SysListView32 to be exact) to show/hide the icons depending on user preferences. This has worked well for years, but recently I enabled the Windows Desktop wallpaper rotation, and I noticed that this function randomly…
If you program Unicode applications using Microsoft Visual C/C++ compiler, then you most probably use the TCHAR strings. While using TCHAR strings is very easy, one of the most common problem for me, after a years of ANSI string experience, is to find a correct C/C++ string function to do the same job as I…
It’s common for Windows executable to get and process the additional parameters from the command line. This way you can pass any custom actions when launching an application i.e. open a particular file, print a file, control the application visibility state, etc. If you are working on C/C++ console application, then you can easily get…
When developing a desktop application, it’s often required that only one instance of application should be executable at a time. This is usually implemented in different ways depending on Language/Tools you are using to build the application. Some common techniques used are either using the Mutex or getting a list of active processes and making…
If you are writing any application which adds an icon to the Taskbar notification area, it’s recommend to handle the “WM_TASKBARCREATED” the message sent by explorer. This message is sent by explorer when it’s creating the taskbar. As after crash explorer doesn’t remember the original notification icons, you should handle this message and then re-register…
In one of my utilities, I was using the IsWindowVisible function to get the current window state. Though it seems to be working at start, I found that it randomly fails and when debugging the issue, the IsWindowVisible was not returning the correct state i.e. a non-zero value even if the window was not visible. This…
I was developing a small utility in C++, and was using the classes to make my program easy to read and maintain (we all know OOP is better than structured approach most of the time). In one of my class member function, I needed to create a new Window and thus need to populate the…
Embedding DLL and binary files in the Executable applications Though for most of the cases, it’s recommended keep the resources and other libraries separate from the main executable. This makes the main application executable size small, and thus that application will take less memory on load and will load/unload the external resources as required. Yet…
