Skip to main content

The Windows Message Loop

This is the heart of the whole program, pretty much everything that your program does passes through this point of control.

while(GetMessage(&Msg, NULL , 0, 0) > 0)
{
TranslateMessage(&Msg);
DispatchMessage(&Msg);
}

return Msg.wParam;

GetMessage() gets a message from your application's message queue. Any time the user moves the mouse, types on the keyboard, clicks on your window's menu, or does any number of other things, messages are generated by the system and entered into your program's message queue. By calling GetMessage() you are requesting the next available
message to be removed from the queue and returned to you for processing. If there is no message, GetMessage() Blocks. If you are unfamiliar with the term, it means that it waits untill there is a message, and then returns it to you.

TranslateMessage() does some additional processing on keyboard events like generating WM_CHAR messages to go along with WM_KEYDOWN messages. Finally DispatchMessage() sends the message out to the window that the message was sent to. This could be our main window or it could be another one, or a control, and in some cases a
window that was created behind the scenes by the sytem or another program. This isn't something you need to worry about because all we are concerned with is that we get the message and send it out, the system takes care of the rest making sure it gets to the proper window.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Explain Polymorphism and Flavors of Polymorphism...

Polymorphism is the ability of different objects to react in an individual manner to the same message. This notion was imported from natural languages. For example, the verb "to close" means different things when applied to different objects. Closing a door, closing a bank account, or closing a program's window are all different actions; their exact meaning is determined by the object on which the action is performed. Most object-oriented languages implement polymorphism only in the form of virtual functions. But C++ has two more mechanisms of static (meaning: compile-time) polymorphism: Operator overloading. Applying the += operator to integers or string objects, for example, is interpreted by each of these objects in an individual manner. Obviously, the underlying implementation of += differs in every type. Yet, intuitively, we can predict what results are. Templates. A vector of integers, for example, reacts differently from a vector of string objects when it receives ...

MFC - Microsoft Foundation Classes Design Patterns

1 Introduction This paper describes the use of object-oriented software design patterns, as presented in Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Gamma et al., within the Microsoft Foundation Class Library (MFC). MFC is used for implementing applications for Microsoft Windows operating systems. Because of the size of the MFC library, a complete analysis would have been beyond the scope of this assignment. Instead, we identified various possible locations for design patterns, using the class hierachy diagram of MFC, and studied the source carefully at these locations. When we did not find a pattern where we expected one, we have documented it anyway, with examples of how the particular problem could have been solved differently, perhaps more elegantly, using design patterns. We have included a brief introduction to MFC in Section 2 , as background information. The analysis has been split into three parts, with one section for each major design pattern ca...

Explain Mutable Object Member or data member

When a data member is declared mutable, then it is legal to assign a value to it from a const member function. The following example may demonstrate when it is needed: class Buffer { void * data; //raw data buffer to be transmitted on the net size_t size; //size of the data mutable int crc; //used to verify that no errors occurred during transmission; //a mutable variable is allowed to be modified from a const //member function. public: //... int GetCrc() const; void Transmit() const; //copmutation of crc_val should be done here }; void f() { Buffer buffer; //...fill buffer with data buffer.Transmit(); //crc can be modified here; other members may not } Class buffer uses a data buffer transmitted via communication link after it has been filled. The filling process is quite slow and repetitive, so there's no point in calculating the value of crc every time a few bytes are appended to data. On the other hand, the receiving size has to get the right crc of the data in order ...