ShowWindow(g_hWnd, 1);
UpdateWindow(g_hWnd);
I am wondering why we need to call UpdateWindow following the ShowWindow?
It is entirely unnecessary, your window will paint just fine without it.
You'll see a minor benefit from it if your program goes off doing lots of stuff after creating the window but before entering the message loop. The user has something to look at. A splash screen is the more typical approach.
ShowWindow does not repaint the window. The call to UpdateWindow sends WM_PAINT message to the window and thus repainting it.
Normally, the system sends WM_PAINT only if the message queue is empty. Under normal circumstances this is good enough and it actually optimizes out a lot of unnecessary repaint. The messages in the queue often will change application state which can often result in invalidating part of the window, and hence result in yet another painting (so the user sees the new application state). So the repaint just happens after all such messages are handled and the system thinks the new window content will be valid for some time (until yet another message(s) come into the queue).
However if you need to force the WM_PAINT immediately and bypass the logic above, you may force sending WM_PAINT (if there is an invalid region) by calling UpdateWindow().
ShowWindow causes a WM_PAINT message, whereas anything which makes a previously hidden part of a window visible. UpdateWindow does any outstanding paint message(s) to be delivered immediately, waiting until the paint processing is complete until returning. Without the call to UpdateWindow the message isn't received until your program goes into the message loop. This avoids any possible delay in response to the user.
Related
I have a fairly simple windows program that created a listview control that should exactly fill the client area. That works at start up, and I think will work if the window is resized --- except the windows NEVER receives any WM_SIZE messages (after the initial one sent on window creation.) I verified this using Spy++x64 as an administrator to ensure I was capturing everything. Spy++ showed the window receiving WM_SIZING, WM_WINPOSCHANGED, WM_NCCALCSIZE, and WM_WINPOSCHANGING (this list isn't in any particular order) but NEVER a WM_SIZE.
This is a 64-bit program, but I don't know why that should matter.
So, is there something I could have done that allows the window to be completely resizable, but prevent Windows from ever generating WM_SIZE messages when that happens? If not, is there something I need to do (that was never needed in the past 30 years) to let Windows know I need to see those WM_SIZE events?
It turns out that the default window procedure generates the WM_SIZE when it processed WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGED and, since I was handling WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGED, no size messages were created. So I forwarded the position changed message to the default handler and the messages are back.
This follows documented behavior. There's a remark in the documentation for the WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGED documentation:
By default, the DefWindowProc function sends the WM_SIZE and WM_MOVE messages to the window. The WM_SIZE and WM_MOVE messages are not sent if an application handles the WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGED message without calling DefWindowProc. It is more efficient to perform any move or size change processing during the WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGED message without calling DefWindowProc.
Yup, I'm sorry to admit that I failed to read the documentation for all of the Window messages that I was NOT having problems with when I needed to find out about WM_SIZE. Silly me for not assuming the documentation I needed about WM_SIZE was only to be found under some other message! All it says about the message generation in the WM_SIZE documentation is:
Sent to a window after its size has changed.
There is no mention AT ALL of any dependency on the default processing for a DIFFERENT message to be found. Ergo, the behavior is effectively undocumented, especially since it may be critical information, as it was for me.
Oh well, I give up, this place has become far too much of just smacking people down for asking questions some people think are too easily answered. Try to remember that not everyone has an eidetic memory and access to all of the documentation you have all memorized. Some of us look up the thing we're working on and expect to find the important details about it. THEY ARE NOT PRESENT. Bye!
My goal is to disable some tool-tip-like thing in window of another process. My thoughts are to block WM_MOUSEMOVE if the coordinates of mouse movement is in certain rectangle of the window.
I can use SetWindowsHookEx to receive that messages (WH_CALLWNDPROC and WH_GETMESSAGE), but it doesn't allow to block them. I can return 1 instead of calling CallNextHookEx, but it doesn't prevent WndProc of window to receive the message. However, this approach works for blocking events in MOUSE_LL/KEYBOARD_LL.
SetWindowsHookEx is also not good, because it installs hook to all windows across the system.
How I can prevent window of another process from receiving certain windows messages?
The WH_GETMESSAGE message hook doesn't let you "block" or cancel the message but you can modify it. So simply change lpMsg->message to WM_NULL to prevent the mouse move message from being processed by the target window.
In reference to Windows GDI, what is the difference between an invalid and valid region? I understand that a call to InvalidateRect() sends a WM_PAINT message to the queue, but what exactly is an "invalid" region?
I understand that a call to InvalidateRect() sends a WM_PAINT message to the queue.
Well, not exactly. When you call InvalidateRect, you mark that rectangular region as being invalid and needing to be repainted. But no messages are sent. In fact, no message is even posted to the queue.
When you call GetMessage, or one of its equivalents, if the queue is empty, and there are windows in the thread that have dirty regions, then the system synthesises a WM_PAINT message. This synthesised WM_PAINT message is returned from GetMessage. The window's handler for WM_PAINT should then paint the window and thus make it valid again.
So, an invalid region is one that is pending painting. You have told the system that you want that region to be re-painted, and the system will arrange for that to happen once the higher priority queued messages have been processed.
The windowing system generally tries to avoid redrawing anything unless necessary, e.g. because something has changed, or another window has moved across it. When this happens, it marks the region as invalid to say that it needs to be redrawn. Alternatively, a region/window can be manually invalidated to force a redraw.
When the application responds to the WM_PAINT message, it will try to be as efficient as possible by only redrawing in the invalidated area. When it's finished, it marks it as valid to indicate that it's now up-to-date.
This selective redraw approach isn't as important today as it used to be. In the past, the drawing operations were much slower, so optimisation was absolutely essential.
I'm a bit confused currently: Are WM_CLOSE and ::CloseWindow in any way "related" or are for completely different things?
The docs for Closing Windows don't mention the API function CloseWindow at all. Should CloseWindow be really called "MinimizeWindow" or what am I missing?
CloseWindow and WM_CLOSE are completely unrelated. The CloseWindow function is badly named. Its inverse function, OpenWindow is similarly badly named given that it restores windows.
I suspect these names dates back a very long way indeed, probably to Windows version 1 or 2. I'm speculating that what we now call minimize and restore were, back then, called close and open.
The usual way to minimize or restore a window is to call ShowWindow passing SW_MINIMIZE or SW_RESTORE.
I suggest that you forget all about CloseWindow and OpenWindow.
CloseWindow is an unusually poorly named winapi function. It doesn't actually close a window, it just minimizes it. What you possibly meant was DestroyWindow().
WM_CLOSE is normally a message that's generated by default window procedure, in response to the user pressing Alt+F4 or clicking the window's close button. The underlying message is WM_SYSCOMMAND, SC_CLOSE. It can be generated in code as well, like a Window + Close menu item.
You can listen for WM_CLOSE in your window procedure or the MFC message map. The user will expect the window to be closed. So you normally call DestroyWindow(). You don't have to, you might display a message box for example and ask the user if data should be saved. And if he clicks No then you don't call DestroyWindow().
I would say ignore CloseWindow and OpenWindow() for the reasons the previous poster suggested. However, while technically doable, it is considered bad form to handle whether to save or actually destroy a window (ie prompting the user) during WM_DESTROY. Once DestroyWindow is called and the OS sends a WM_DESTROY message, the expectation is to prepare for the destruction of the window. So the workflow should have be like this:
Send a WM_CLOSE to the window handle in question. CloseWindow SHOULD do this, like DestroyWindow sends a WM_DESTROY message or ShowWindow sends a WM_SHOWWINDOW message. But again, since it doesn't, send the WM_CLOSE to the window.
Next, during the processing of the WM_CLOSE message, you can ask the user if they wish to save anything, or if they intend to actually close the window. If they cancel closing the window, simply return ZERO to tell the OS you processed the message. If the user indicates they wish to proceed, THEN you can call DestroyWindow OR simply pass the message to DefWindowProc, which the promptly do the same. Any saving of files should happen during the processing of WM_CLOSE. During the processing of WM_DESTROY, you should delete any dynamically allocated memory associated with the window and free resources. And finally FYI, WM_NCDESTROY is the last message a window receives.
We have a MFC Visual-C++ application that is not reacting to any user input.
(Note: Currently only known on one machine. The behavior does recur occasionally, but only after the App has been running for several days!)
The application is redrawn when we switch to it via Alt-Tab (or the Task Bar), but we cannot, for example, activate it's main window by clicking on the title bar.
We have already pulled 4 dumps with WinDbg and checked the active instructions. We always were in some redraw code or somesuch inside the main thread (the GUI thread). We definitely were/are not in a modal message loop and the main thread's stack always looked "OK". (Most/all worker threads were idling, waiting for some event, no suspicious code there either.)
When investigating the problem with Spy++, we see the behavior specified also in this separate question, namely that we seem to get paint and activation messages, but no user input is routed to the application. When I have the application window on the screen, and select it to show messages of the main window,
it will only show "generic" "referesh" messages and nothing else
If I drill deeper, and select all messages for the whole process,
this is what we see:
The app is apparently only processing messages on one hidden sub-window (00CB09F0), and what we see there is a constant stream of 200 WM_PAINT messages per second.
Normally this Sub Window isn't processing any messages at all (except refresh WM_PAINT etc. when Windows sends them). It is normally used as a drawing area and the drawing happens through a WM_TIMER message on it's parent (010A09B8) window. (This WM_TIMER message isn't shown on the hanging app either though.)
The performance profile as shown in process explorer looks like this (100% kernel time, more or less):
I'd say that you have a redraw loop in that window that receives the WM_PAINT flood.
That usually happens if you call Invalidate or similar from the processing of the WM_PAINT message, directly or indirectly.
Other posibility is that, since you say that you are using a timer to redraw the window, the actual drawing is taking more time that the time it self, so the messages pile up in the queue.
Yet another posibility is that you are invalidating the window from a different thread than the one making the painting.
Anyway, you should ensure that you are calling Invalidate*() properly (you showed no code), and never from the OnPaint event. And avoid calling UpdateWindow() as this function can mess things if called without a little care.
I've seen this problem when an exception is thrown from a dialog. MFC's DoModal function disables the main program window then reenables it when the dialog returns; exceptions bypass the reenabling part and the main window remains disabled forever.