Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
In computer programming, event-driven programming or event-based programming is a programming paradigm in which the flow of the program is determined by events—i.e., sensor outputs or user actions or messages from other programs or threads.Event-driven programming can also be defined as an...
Message passing in computer science is a form of communication used in parallel computing, object-oriented programming, and interprocess communication. In this model, processes or objects can send and receive messages to other processes...
that the operating system posts to the main thread of the application. These messages are received from the message queue
Message queue
In computer science, message queues and mailboxes are software-engineering components used for interprocess communication, or for inter-thread communication within the same process. They use a queue for messaging – the passing of control or of content...
by the application by repeatedly calling the GetMessage (or PeekMessage) function in a section of code called the "event loop
Event loop
In computer science, the event loop, message dispatcher, message loop, message pump, or run loop is a programming construct that waits for and dispatches events or messages in a program...
Though not strictly required, it's conventional for the event loop to call TranslateMessage and DispatchMessage, which transfers the message to the callback procedure associated with the window the message refers to.
Developed by Microsoft, the Windows Presentation Foundation is a computer-software graphical subsystem for rendering user interfaces in Windows-based applications. WPF, previously known as "Avalon", was initially released as part of .NET Framework 3.0. Rather than relying on the older GDI...
The Microsoft Foundation Class Library is a library that wraps portions of the Windows API in C++ classes, including functionality that enables them to use a default application framework...
Qt is a cross-platform application framework that is widely used for developing application software with a graphical user interface , and also used for developing non-GUI programs such as command-line tools and consoles for servers...
et al. do not typically require applications to directly access the Windows message loop, but instead automatically route events such as key presses and mouse clicks to their appropriate handlers as defined within the framework. Underlying these frameworks, however, the message loop can again be found, and can typically be accessed when more direct control is required.
