Programming Windows®, Fifth Edition

Character Messages

Earlier in this chapter, I discussed the idea of translating keystroke messages into character messages by taking shift-state information into account. I warned you that shift-state information is not enough: you also need to know about country-dependent keyboard configurations. For this reason, you should not attempt to translate keystroke messages into character codes yourself. Instead, Windows does it for you. You’ve seen this code before:

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

This is a typical message loop that appears in WinMain. The GetMessage function fills in the msg structure fields with the next message from the queue. DispatchMessage calls the appropriate window ...