Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sample.eng.ohio-state.edu!purdue!haven.umd.edu!udel!princeton!siemens!demon!jrv From: jrv@demon.siemens.com (James R Vallino) Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms.programmer Subject: Does a window know when it is being overwritten? Message-ID: <59847@siemens.siemens.com> Date: 1 May 91 22:09:14 GMT Sender: news@siemens.siemens.com Reply-To: jrv@demon.siemens.com Organization: Siemens Corporate Research, Inc. Lines: 27 Continuing to persue my previous problem with an image processing task under Windows, I have a much more Windows specific question. Does a window know when it is being overwritten? The potential exists whenever the input focus is lost. The focus will be lost whenever another application is brought up on top of my client area. This is also true when my application brings up a dialog box. For drop down menus and child windows I don't think that is true. I have control over when the child window will appear. I don't recall any message sent just before a menu is dropped. The basic problem is that before anyone overwrites part of my client display memory, I have to save the pixels which will be overwritten. I don't have another copy of the pixel data. It has been generated by a coprocessor on the display card running some algorithms on my image data. I could keep a shadow copy of the data in extra memory on the display card. But I will still not know if it is OK for the display coprocessor to write the data to the diplay area if I don't know that I own all of the pixels in my client area. I think I'm going to have to bag the idea of using Windows without adding more cost to my display board to get some extra hardware support. Thanks! -- Jim Vallino Siemens Corporate Research, Inc., Princeton, NJ jrv@demon.siemens.com princeton!siemens!demon!jrv (609) 734-3331