Windows® via C/C++, Fifth Edition

Putting the CONTEXT in Context

By now, you should understand the important role that the CONTEXT structure plays in thread scheduling. The CONTEXT structure allows the system to remember a thread’s state so that the thread can pick up where it left off the next time it has a CPU to run on.

You might be surprised to learn that such a low-level data structure is completely documented in the Platform SDK. However, if you look up the CONTEXT structure in the documentation, all you’ll see is this:

"A CONTEXT structure contains processor-specific register data. The system uses CONTEXT structures to perform various internal operations. Refer to the header file WinNT.h for definitions of these structures."

The documentation does not show you the structure’s ...