Microsoft Windows 2000 API SuperBible

Chapter 5. MESSAGE PROCESSING

Message handling is at the heart of what makes a Windows application work. The system and other applications generate messages for every event that occurs in Windows. Messages allow Windows to run multiple applications at once. Windows 98 and Windows 2000 give each thread or process its own message queue, allowing each one to work independently. In earlier versions of Windows, all applications shared the message queue. In these versions of Windows, an application had to give control back to Windows as often as possible to allow other applications to process messages. Since Windows 95 and Windows NT were introduced, this is no longer an issue.