Knowledge Base

FIX: Bad POINT Structure in MSG Returned by GetCurrentMessage

Article ID: 135913

Article Last Modified on 11/21/2006


APPLIES TO


This article was previously published under Q135913

SYMPTOMS

MFC provides a function called GetCurrentMessage that returns a pointer to a MSG structure encapsulating the current message being processed. The MSG structure contains a member variable (pt), of type POINT that contains incorrect values.

CAUSE

The GetCurrentMessage function fills in the POINT structure with the following line of code:
   *((DWORD*)&pThreadState->m_lastSentMsg.pt) = ::GetMessagePos();
				
This code was correct in the 16-bit version of Visual C++ because a POINT structure was made up of two intergers (int) that were each 16-bits. Thus the size of a POINT was the same as a DWORD.

However, in the 32-bit version of Windows and of the Visual C++ compiler, a POINT structure is made up of two LONGs, each 32-bits, so the total size of a POINT is now 64-bits and the above assignment is not valid.

RESOLUTION

To obtain the correct value for the point in the current MSG you can use MFC's overridden CPoint constructor which takes a DWORD as an argument. For example:
   CPoint pt(::GetMessagePos());
   // Now pt has the correct values
				
Please note that because the GetCurrentMessage function returns a pointer to a 'const' MSG structure, you can't change the pt member of the message structure.

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a bug in the Microsoft products listed at the beginning of this article. This problem was corrected in Visual C++ version 2.2.

Additional query words: 2.00 2.10 3.00 3.10

Keywords: kbarchitecture kbbug kbdocview kbfix kbnoupdate kbvc200fix kbvc220fix KB135913