Windows Developer News for the week of Oct 1st

The following content is new for this week:

• New Hilo article released
• Power Management Guidelines added to the Windows Team Blog
• Learn to Program for Windows Module 4: User Input 
• Browse Windows Developer Content by Resource Type updated on the Windows Developer Center

New Content

Hilo Chapter 13: Enhancing the Hilo Browser User Interface was released.  This article introduces the sharing features that were adding in Hilo sample code drop 3 on code gallery. This article also explains the Touch enhancements that were made in Hilo browser to enable panning, zooming, and other gestures that are enabled with the Windows Touch API.

The Windows team blog has a blog post, Power Management Guidelines, that explains why developers should care about creating power-aware applications.  The key points are that you can reduce the power consumption of your application and improve performance by testing your application for some basic power considerations and that power considerations should be a consideration for all Windows developers.

Mike Wasson wrote Learn to Program for Windows Module 4: User Input for the Learn to Program for Windows in C++ series.  This new module covers:

 

• Mouse Input
• Responding to Mouse Clicks
• Mouse Movement
• Miscellaneous Mouse Operations
• Keyboard Input
• Accelerator Tables
• Setting the Cursor Image
• User Input: Extended Example

 

So there's plenty of interesting content in the module that is great for beginners but that might be useful even for more seasoned C++ programmers.  

We recently updated the 

 

What's the standard way to use GetMessage?

Adeyblue brought up a good point on the Learn to Program for Windows series.  The way that the message loop is handled in the series:

 

 while (GetMessage(…))

is inconsistent with other guidance from the Windows API GetMessage where developers approach the message loop using the following coding pattern:

 

      while (ret = GetMessage(…)))
     {
           if (ret == -1)
           {
                // fail
           }
     }

While there may be some confusion between which method / approach you take in your applications, both are perfectly good approaches because GetMessage should return -1 only on invalid parameters which means that correct code will not receive this error.

IE 9 Quirks and Tips

A coworker has been experiencing a small issue in IE 9 where sometimes performing queries directly from the address bar ala Chrome causes the browser to return the "I'm feeling lucky" style result.  To resolve this, he used a really nifty trick: put a ? into the address bar and it will then correctly perform searches.  Another way to fix it is to use the Control + E hotkey (search) or by pressing alt+enter when the content is in the URL (open search result in a new tab).

The IE blog recently posted a few handy shortcuts for the notification bar:

Alt-N – gives focus to the notification bar 
Alt-N & Enter – corresponds to first button on the notification bar 
Alt-N & Esc – dismisses the notification bar

See Also

• How to write a Windows app with Hilo
• Just let it flow blog (adeyblue)
• IE Blog 
• IE 9 Keyboard Shortcuts

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 02, 2010
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  October 06, 2010
  FYI:

1. Click your start menu
2. Click Control Panel
3. Programs and Features
4. Click View Installed Updates There will be a section “Microsoft Windows”
5. Find “Windows Internet Explorer 9” in the Microsoft Windows section
6. Right click, Uninstall