winapi

How to change the Title of the command prompt window

How can I change the title of the command prompt window every time I execute a dos-based program by double clicking it, in c language. Should I use the Windows API? ...

Simplest way to change listview and treeview colours

I'm trying to find a simple way to change the colour of the text and background in listview and treeview controls in WTL or plain Win32 code. I really don't want to have to implement full owner drawing for these controls, simply change the colours used. I want to make sure that the images are still drawn with proper transparency. Any sug...

How many rows should be in the (main) buffer of a virtual Listview control?

How many rows should be in the (main) buffer of a virtual Listview control? I am witting an application in pure 'c' to the Win32 API. There is an ODBC connection to a database which will retrieve the items (actually rows). The MSDN sample code implies a fixed size buffer of 30 for the end cache (Which would almost certainly not be o...

Best programming language to write a Windows File Manager app.

I would like to write my own file manager i.e. something like what XYplorer or Free Commander does but with a feature set that's more helpful to programmers. What's the best language to write this. I'm basically looking for a language that has both rich GUI libraries and a nice wrapper library over the Windows Shell API. I tried with C...

Where's the Win32 resource for the mouse cursor for dragging splitters?

I am building a custom win32 control/widget and would like to change the cursor to a horizontal "splitter" symbol when hovering over a particular vertical line in the control. IE: I want to drag this vertical line (splitter bar) left and right (WEST and EAST). Of the the system cursors (OCR_*), the only cursor that makes sense is the OC...

Copy a file without using the windows file cache

Anybody know of a way to copy a file from path A to path B and suppressing the Windows file system cache? Typical use is copying a large file from a USB drive, or server to your local machine. Windows seems to swap everything out if the file is really big, e.g. 2GiB. Prefer example in C#, but I'm guessing this would be a Win32 call of so...

How do you programmatically change the tab order in a Win32 dialog?

Often time I need to add a control to a dialog after the dialog has been generated via dialog template and CreateDialogIndirect. In these cases the tab order is set by the dialog template and there is no obvious way to change the tab order by including a newly created control. ...

Win32 List-View Control SubItem padding for custom-drawn SubItems?

When using custom-draw (NM_CUSTOMDRAW) to draw the entire contents of a ListView SubItem (in Report/Details view), it would be nice to be able to apply the same left and right padding in my custom paint method that is applied by the control itself for non-custom-drawn items. Is there a way to programmatically retrieve this padding value...

Win32 ToolTip disappears never to re-appear with Commctl 6

I'm creating a ToolTip window and adding tools to it using the flags TTF_IDISHWND | TTF_SUBCLASS. (c++, win32) I have a manifest file such that my program uses the new WindowsXP themes (comctrl32 version 6). When I hover over a registered tool, the tip appears. Good. When I click the mouse, the tip disappears. Ok. However, moving away ...

Why does clicking a child window not always bring the application to the foreground?

When an application is behind another applications and I click on my application's taskbar icon, I expect the entire application to come to the top of the z-order, even if an app-modal, WS_POPUP dialog box is open. However, some of the time, for some of my (and others') dialog boxes, only the dialog box comes to the front; the rest of t...

Polygon fill modes in GDI and GDI+

The system default polygon fill mode in current device context is ALTERNATE (as I've learned from the Petzold book on Windows programming) and this one is used in Polygon Win32 function unless you change the mode with SetPolyFillMode. My question is: Does the GDI+ Graphics::FillPolygon (without the FillMode parameter in its signature) m...

Vista BEX error

Recently I got IE7 crashed on Vista on jar loading (presumably) with the following error: Problem signature: Problem Event Name: BEX Application Name: iexplore.exe Application Version: 7.0.6001.18000 Application Timestamp: 47918f11 Fault Module Name: ntdll.dll Fault Module Version: 6.0....

What is the best practice for writing Registry calls/File Sytem calls/Process creation filter for WinXP, Vista?

We needed to monitor all processes Registry calls/File Sytem calls/Process creations in the system (for the antivirus hips module) . Also time by time it will be needed to delay some calls or decline them. ...

Win32 CreatePatternBrush

MSDN displays the following for CreatePatternBrush: You can delete a pattern brush without affecting the associated bitmap by using the DeleteObject function. Therefore, you can then use this bitmap to create any number of pattern brushes. My question is the opposite. If the HBRUSH is long lived, can I delete the HBITMAP ...

Stop system entering 'standby'..

How can i stop the host machine entering 'standby' mode while my application is running? Is there any win32 api call to do this? ...

Objective C for Windows

What would be the best way to write Objective-C on the Windows platform? Cygwin and gcc? Is there a way I can somehow integrate this into Visual Studio? Along those lines - are there any suggestions as to how to link in and use the Windows SDK for something like this. Its a different beast but I know I can write assembly and link in th...

File system info - how to query it?

Is there a way to access file system info via some type of Windows API? If not what other methods are available to a user mode developer? ...

How to detect true Windows version

I know I can call the GetVersionEx Win32 API function to retrieve Windows version. In most cases returned value reflects the version of my Windows, but sometimes that is not so. If a user runs my application under the compatibility layer, then GetVersionEx won't be reporting the real version but the version enforced by the compatibility...

Default button size?

How do I create a button control (with CreateWindow of a BUTTON window class) that has a standard system-wide size (especially height) that's consistent with the rest of Windows applications? I should of course take DPI into account and probably other settings. Remark: Using USE_CW_DEFAULT for width and height results in a 0, 0 size ...

Windows CDROM Eject

Does anyone know a method to programmatically close the CD tray on Windows 2000 or higher? Open CD tray exists, but I can't seem to make it close especially under W2k. I am especially looking for a method to do this from a batch file, if possible, but API calls would be OK. ...